Who Said That Christmas Is A Drag?

Are you sick of enduring the same old Christmas rituals, year in and year out?
The annual trip to Church, the obligatory dinner with estranged relatives, the handing over of hard-earned money to ruder-than-usual shop assistants in exchange for meaningless presents to offer estranged relatives?

If you’re someone who can’t get through the festive season without copious amounts of Egg Nog, then you might find solace in the company of The Shamcocks.
For those of you not entirely au fait with the transgressive cabaret scene, The Shamcocks are Ireland’s premier ‘drag king’ troupe. Since their inception in March of this year, they have evolved into an all-singing, all-dancing, venue-capacity-reaching cultural force. They’ve doubled in number from ten to eighteen, and performed to sell-out crowds in Dublin, Galway, Cork and Waterford.
Founding member Jude Cosgrove remembers a very different Ireland of yesteryear: “For a while I would have been the one and only drag king knocking around the little city of Dublin just over three years ago,” she says. “I started to get very bored because the drag queen scene is very saturated and when you’re one person doing the sort of thing I was doing, it’s a bit difficult to break into that. If you have a drag king troupe it’s a really different dynamic.”
Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. Imagine the sense of national disgrace when a group of Dublin-bound drag kings from Chicago were seeking out their Irish counterparts, only to discover that none existed. They felt it from Ballyferriter to Ramelton! A gap in the market was identified, The Shamcocks formed – and the rest is history. Needless to say, with well-received shows in Toronto and Chicago (at the sixth Annual International Drag King Extravaganza, no less), The Shamcocks have done their bit to put Ireland on the drag king map. Sure aren’t we all really proud of them now...
The troupe are also keen to take drag beyond its traditional roots in the pink end of the entertainment spectrum.
“We’re trying to branch out a little bit more,” Jude says. “Every show, we do we try to do new things. For the moment most our audience would be queer and quite mixed in terms of males and females. But a lot of people have seen us that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be into the whole queer scene and they get a right giggle out of it. My Ma loves it!”
It must be difficult, channelling the creativity of eighteen women.
“There’s a real mix of us and it’s a nice creative buzz,” says Cosgrove. “Most of us have regular day jobs but a lot of us have a background in directing, photography, choreography, drama. We have so many ideas between us that what we do works on different levels, depending on how you want to watch the show.
“Some of the numbers will be tightly choreographed group numbers and they’re quite camp, like Emma Bunton’s ‘Maybe’. Anothers are in a more low-key style, like David Bowie’s ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’. It’s very minimalist and it’s playing on the whole idea of the Matrix agents; the whole thing is a satire on American capitalism and neo-conservatism. Other stuff is more slapstick, like the Elvis medley, where we show Elvis getting older and fatter until he dies.
“About three-quarters of the material is highly accessible and one quarter might be a little surprising or shocking. But there’s nothing that’s explicit or violent.”
To what extent is a drag king troupe incongruous in a relatively traditional society like Ireland?
“I’m no expert on the entertainment industry but it strikes me that Dublin does have a tradition for alternative entertainment,” says Cosgrove. “If you look at the Alternative Miss Ireland, that’s a damn big competition and it’s been going for more than ten years.
“I think there’s always a reaction on some level, however far underground it is, to mainstream conservatism, and Ireland does have a really strong literary and theatre tradition.”
From her own experiences as a drag king, Cosgrove believes that levels of open-mindedness shift dramatically between generations.
“I’ve an 18 year-old sister and she and her friends just could not give a damn. But if you go up to people going into their forties, they’ve been brought up in a very Catholic tradition so they’re dealing with lots of other baggage that the 18 year olds just haven’t had to handle.”
Nonetheless, The Shamcocks have never caused any negative reactions. “Most people who aren’t used to it are surprised or amused rather than offended – although I wouldn’t be going everywhere looking like that. There’s a certain element of self-protection.”
What about the assumption that all drag kings and queens are necessarily cross-dressers?
“Even to talk about cross-dressing and women is very confusing. For men, the divide is rather clear, but for women in modern society the whole notion of cross-dressing is very blurred.
“I think dress aside, what there might be confusion about is gender identity, which is ‘OK, this is a woman dressing as a man so therefore she wants to be a man’. And for most Kings that I’ve met, that’s not the point at all. In fact, some Kings be are most full-blooded women you’ll ever meet in terms of enjoying their femaleness.
“We want to play with gender and laugh at it. We look at our own constructions of gender and common stereotypes of it. By putting them out there and juxtaposing them with your own femaleness they become very visible.
“I’ve talked to several straight women who are also very interested,” she adds. “And there’s a few blokes that have performed with us on a regular basis that do a form of drag king, just to confuse matters further. They might look at how we dress and do an exaggerated version of their own masculinity, which is pretty hilarious!”
With a big Christmas show planned for Dublin’s Sugar Club on December 12, The Shamcocks are casting “a queer eye for the straight festive season”.
“I can’t reveal too much but it will be lots of fun,” says Cosgrove, “and there might be a live satellite link-up with Santo…”
With Christmas being a traditionally family-orientated holiday, does it become an issue that gay couples not accepted by their families might be “left out in the cold” so to speak?
“I think it is an issue for some people, and certainly, for that reason, Christmas for them has bad connotations. I think this is a reason why nights like our night, and other alternative nights that basically poke fun a little bit, might be refreshing for those people – indeed anybody else that is pissed off with having commercial and very traditional Christian Christmases shoved down their throats.”

The Shamcocks play The Sugar Club, Dublin, on December 12 and February 11 (with guest performers from San Francisco).