Most people will know Selina Mosinski as Sue Tuke AKA the indomitable Charity Shop Sue. This summer she’s bringing a new character to Edinburgh Fringe – and Notts – in her one-woman show Puss In Boots: A Working Class Fairy Tale, directed by Notts own Matt Chesney of Dead Sweet TV. Ahead of the show, we spoke to Selina about writing for the stage, 90s culture and how the Notts accent is reaching audiences…
Selina, you’re a busy laydeh! Your upcoming show is a new character - Randy Cain. Tell us a little about her…
It's funny because basically Randy's just me. It's being a character actor – I struggle with just being myself as a stand-up comedian. I need a wig or an alter ego, so she allows me to do what I want. The show is about my journey to the stage, through the stripping world in the late 90s and noughties from a working-class perspective. It's a comedy with a lot of parody about third wave feminism – it's a bit of a wild ride.
Last year you starred in Notts writer Paris Lees’ excellent coming of age drama What It Feels Like For a Girl, which is set in 00s Notts. Did working with Paris on an auto-biographical adaptation inspire you to look at your own life for inspiration?
I think her work, the show and the book, are just bloody brilliant. It's a really important story and it’s part of the [LGBTQ+] community which is really important to me. It's great to see a Nottingham artist doing so well. It was a big honour to work on such an amazing project, the cast were amazing! But I'd actually already been working on the stripper idea for a long time. I wanted to go back into that world and talk to people working in the industry – I just didn't know where it was going.
What was the process of pulling stories from your own past like? Did you write at the time?
I wasn't writing anything then, and I never kept a diary – I'm not that organised. I didn't start doing anything creative until I was probably 25 or 26. I've only really got the confidence to write bigger pieces over the last five or six years. But I've got such strong memories.
The show is about my journey to the stage, through the stripping world in the late 90s and noughties from a working-class perspective. It's a comedy with a lot of parody about third wave feminism – it's a bit of a wild ride
This is a very weird show; it's based on real events but told in a very surreal way and massively exaggerated. There’s a part in the show where they go to Ascot, and they’re stripping on the bus on the way there – that was meant to be a ‘VIP experience’. We were on a bus with no curtains, taking our clothes off for a fiver a time with truck drivers going past beeping their horns. I don't want to write something completely literal. I want to find different ways of telling it – even just that bus trip in itself is absurd, because it is bonkers. And that is life, isn't it?
And are you playing the characters yourself?
Timothy Chesney, who is brilliant as a performer and creative in his own right, is doing the voices. He does the voice for Sylvia Young and the girls in the club. He's doing all the voiceovers with blow-up dolls. But yes, I'm playing the other characters.
You’re moving from screen to stage. Was rethinking how you perform quite a challenge?
This was the best way of creating the story, because I’ve been able to have free rein. I want it to be surreal – so if I might want Gillian McKeefe to pop up, or twenty tampons to pop out of a doll if I’m talking about toxic shock syndrome. If it was for TV, you’ve got restrictions. I’d have to think ‘is this too weird?’ I also really wanted to perform live more, and a lot of the time with TV you’re waiting for things to get moving.
The show is set in the late 90s. What’s changed since then and what were some key elements you wanted to get in the show?
Look, me and my mates had a great time – you had this big ladette culture and it felt like everything was possible for women. But the media was all still male-dominated, and how far can you get with that? There were pictures of women falling out of clubs drunk, and upskirting was a huge thing. So you've got all this apparent sexual freedom that the press was pushing, but they were just completely commodifying the female form and then using it to their advantage. This is what happens when you're living in a male dominated world. You’ve got to address it and dip into that absurdity, but again, it's a comedy – otherwise it’d just be too dark.
You’ve been playing Sue for fourteen years. How does Randy differ from Sue?
They are completely different! But they are both gals trying to survive in their own way. Sue is cunning but at heart means well. Barbara, a character in the show, has a few 'Sueisms' – a layered character that has bite… that's very Sue! But Randy is eighteen and clumsily trying to find her way to the big smoke, luckily for her she has her fairy godmother 'Sylvia' guiding her but seems to keep steering her in the wrong direction. Sue would most certainly not need a guide to get her anywhere!
You're performing over three weeks at Edinburgh Fringe. How are you feeling about that?
Erm… apprehensive!? I'm getting IV drips up there, which sounds so bougie. I'm in my mid 40s and I need the extra boost so no judgement please… I performed a big chunk of the material in Leicester the other week and I just loved every second. I love the material, I love the process. We've got a couple of weeks to get it to the final draft, but it's there. I can feel it and I'm excited.
Puss In Boots: A Working Class Fairytale will be at Pleasance King Dome, Edinburgh between 5-30 August. You can also catch a Notts special preview at Fisher Gate Point on Saturday 4 July 7-8pm. Look out for a longer version of this interview with Selina and Charity Shop Sue/Puss in Boots director Matt Chesney on the LeftLion Interviews Podcast later this month.
@selinamosinski_
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