If a film is made of the life of Jonny Woo – and it should be – the only person who could play this dancer, drag artist, poet, actor, writer, DJ and night club owner is: Jonny Woo.
If he is a diamond of a performer, it’s because all the rough edges have been polished away by a life well and badly lived.
Jonny opens on 13 September playing Cleopatra in what promises to be a jaw-dropping all out, gay male version of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at his own The Divine queer night club in Dalston, east London.
Jonny – real name Jonathan Wooster – trained in London as a dancer, and then decided to improve his hoofing in New York. “I was in my 20s. I needed to give dance a go or I’d regret it,” he told me.
But in New York he caught the performance artist bug, in alternative cabaret and drag. “It was a freaky mish-mash of people,” with the burlesque shows at the Slipper Room at its heart. He fell into a world of mime, dance and spoken word shows that were political, and inevitably a world of sex and drugs.
Typically he might perform in high heels and jockstrap – sometimes even bound up like a mummy, often using the drag name Satanica Pandemonia.
Back in London after 2003 he started at the George and Dragon in Shoreditch as a DJ. “I played my own discs – Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, Simon and Garfunkel and Boney M. Not many others were playing ’80s music so I did, often standing on a beer barrel reading beat poems about the war in Iraq, under UV.”
It worked. A whole scene built up around it. Then he started an event called Radio Egypt – spooky when you remember he’s about to play Cleo.
He explains: “after 9/11, which I lived through in New York, people were shut off, isolated from the world, and so then idea of doing an act as a mummy became a thing.”
Ten years of weekly Gay Bingo followed, but with a wild side to it. It turned into a two and a half hour show of energetic improvisation, fuelled by alcohol.
But eventually this crazy lifestyle caught up with him. “In 2006 I went into a coma. E was my drug of choice: some nights I didn’t go home – I went to wherever the last party was.”
And so his body packed in, leaving him for a few seconds technically dead. “I’m here by the grace of God and the diligent generosity of Homerton Hospital’s intensive care staff.”
But eventually drugs and booze sneaked back into Jonny’s life. “I didn’t learn my lesson,” he admits. But in 2014 he stopped drinking and by now he was running The Glory. He describes it as “a gay bar with a space for performance. It grew into its own thing, a cultural part of the East London community, with performers at its centre. A place for people to start out with their shows: give it a go, we said to them.”
But when the building needed to be sold, The Glory was no more, “we didn’t have the money to buy it.”
But hot on its heels, Jonny now runs The Divine, reflecting the Glory’s unique position.
But what of his latest venture? It was while performing queer theatre-maker Alexis Gregory’s play Sex Crime that director Robert Chevara told Jonny he’d make a great Cleopatra and that they should try and do it. Following a successful workshop, it’s now becoming a reality, and he’s playing opposite Alexis again, along with two other out gay actors – Jonathan Blake and William McGeough.
“Our version of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is set in a night club. Robert has edited the original text down to 70 minutes with music. It focuses on Antony and Cleopatra: I love you/I hate you/don’t leave me.
“It’s a play about ego, narcissism and a heightened state of drug taking – it has its karaoke moments and a bit of techno. We are all gay men of a certain age.”
I asked him how he’ll dress, as he’s playing it as a man and not in drag. “Cis gay men use the pronoun she. I could be in a thong, long boots, a neglige – all are possible right now, but I’m not trying to be a woman. We have masc men, we have femme men and we have trans men now in our queer world.
“I want people who see it to go away having experienced an immersive world, exciting, visceral: a new experience, uplifted by its passions and energy through our artistry.”
Antony and Cleopatra: A Dream Of Passion is at The Divine, London from 13-27 September. Tickets HERE
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