”One thing fuelling McLeish’s rage at the world is his experience of growing up as a man. “I do actually talk about that a bit in the show,” he explains. “Things that used to be water off a duck’s back now make me really angry. Having grown up male adds another layer of fear. The show is me taking a fairly critical view of the world. But I try to make it funny.”
McLeish says that being overprotective of his daughters, who are six and ten, isn’t answer to keep them feeling safe and strong in our culture. “I want them to be informed,” he says. “That is their best defence against everything on a day to day basis. I feel protective but I don’t want to be overprotective; I want them to be informed, educated, so even though they can’t help but absorb all the information that’s out there, they can at least process it.”
McLeish, of course, is best known for playing the lead in the hugely successful Keating the Musical by Casey Bennetto. Bruce Ives directs the show, which also features Rosie Westbrook and JP Shilo, two musicians McLeish feels very grateful to have on board. “They are musicians of such calibre,” he notes. “They’ve played with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and the Black Eyed Susans. I am very happy to have them.” The songs are McLeish’s own; he says that he’s able to express things in song that mightn’t be as easy to simply speak. “In cabaret, I can say the stuff I haven’t wanted to think about; it’s uncomfortable for me to say this stuff out loud. It isn’t just a show for parents – I’m telling silly stories here. A couple of the songs are silly and funny.”
The show’s style, McLeish says, is straight up and down cabaret. “I’ve tried to maintain a thread. It’s contextual comedy, my response to having daughters. When I first wrote it I was very angry and it wasn’t funny; it wasn’t going to be funny for anyone. I tried to imagine how I would tell it to them. This is the show – it’s like the letter you write: Do Not Open Til You’re 18.” McLeish’s daughters will have to wait to hear their dad’s advice, though. “They are definitely too little to see it,” he says. “Even though I’m sort of appropriating their lives in making it.”
Message To My Girls, acts as an antidote to the cynicism McLeish sees around him. “I notice it in young adults, five to ten years older than my girls are now. They are cynical. They are comfortable believing that the world is an evil place and that corporations are greedy and corrupt; it’s been satirised, they’ve had it pointed out to them over and over again. They recognise this. It all lends itself to that feeling of futility and they are in a consistent state of malaise. They don’t feel they can do anything to change the world. This is my way of saying you can’t change the world but you can change your own world.”
BY LIZA DEZFOULI
