Interview: Celine Lowenthal on Sugar Coat at Southwark Playhouse

Celine Lowenthal is the director of the feminist pop-punk hit Sugar Coat coming to Southwark Playhouse this spring following an acclaimed run at VAULT Festival in 2020.

A live music play about love, loss and lubrication, this powerful gig theatre show confronts sex and sexuality in a brutally funny true story about trauma and recovery.

Performed by an all female and non-binary band, we follow one woman’s coming-of-age journey, spanning across eight years of sexual highs and lows, with sprinklings of 90s nostalgia and an unashamedly queer and feminist call to arms.

Featuring original live music inspired by Riot Grrrl bands, such as Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, Veruca Salt and Letters to Cleo, to soundtrack the hilarious and heartfelt mix of rebellious empowerment and laugh-out-loud teen angst.

Celine Lowenthal directs the five strong cast: Rachel Barnes (Manic Street Creature, Paines Plough; Ladhood, BBC), Eve De Leon Allen (Doctor Who, BBC), Dani Heron (Peter Gynt, National Theatre), Anya Pearson and Sarah Workman (Girls Don’t Play Guitar, Liverpool Royal Court).

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Sugar Coat is at Southwark Playhouse Wednesday 29th March – Saturday 22nd April 2023.

Sugar Coat is coming to Southwark Playhouse, what can you tell us about the show?

Sugar Coat is a raucous, joy-filled show about one woman’s odyssey towards sexual healing, told by one of the most talented group of actor-musicians you’ll ever get the chance to see. It’s got all the adrenaline and gut-punches of a fantastic gig, with the tenderness, comedy, and beating heart of a brilliant play.

It was so popular at VAULT Festival in 2020, why do you think that was and has anything changed for this run?

It came to VAULT very raw and very truthful. We’d made the production super fast, and although it was rough and ready (as VAULT shows often have to be!), its soul shone through really brightly. The music is extremely powerful, full of punk sharpness and energy, and the performances have something very direct about them. We’re really speaking directly to our audiences. There are parts of this show where you just can’t look away, and it is unflinching in its accounts of some very painful experiences, which I think our VAULT audiences found refreshing, and for some I think it was very moving.

I love the Vaults with all my heart, and it’s really where this show found its audience, but it’s also such a specific space. Tech conditions are very limited, and often (as we were) you’re sharing a space with a bunch of other companies, so design and movement is limited. For this run at Southwark Playhouse, we’ve been able to really expand the design of the show, working with our brilliantly talented designers to create something bigger, bolder, with a lot more colour and fullness. We’ve been able to be more ambitious, to expand the show (including a new song!), allowing it to breathe more fully. Our hope is that it’s kept that raw, powerful soul, and added depth and layers, to create something really special.

What is it about the way Joel Samuels and Lilly Pollard have written the show that excites you the most?

Oh man, so many things. Firstly, it’s very funny. I don’t think you could tackle such raw material if it wasn’t so funny. And it’s also interesting because, unlike a traditional ‘musical’, the songs in Sugar Coat aren’t part of the action. It’s more like the lead singer of a band has gone rogue and is telling her life story, and the set list just happens to work perfectly with the arc of her tale.

The way the text and songs intertwine is just breath-takingly smart. Joel and Lilly have an amazing emotional intuition, and the script carries the audience on this helter-skelter ride through a life with some really sharp turns. And somehow they do that with such grace, such tenderness; they make it look easy. What they are doing is actually incredible difficult! It’s a wonderful script to work with, so ripe for fun, energised, exciting staging.

Tell us a little more about the actor-musicians who make up the cast? 

What a group! Firstly, even though they mostly stick to their one instrument for this show, what you’re looking at is a group of multi-instrumentalists. These are some very talented human beings! So the work becomes incredibly collaborative, every idea building and becoming stronger through the contributions of the group (with guidance of course from Lilly and Anya as our co-Musical Directors). What is so particularly magnificent about working with Sarah, Eve, Rachel, Dani and Anya is that they bring their musicality to their performances, and their characterful emotional work to their music-making. You really do get the best of both worlds. It is a very special thing to witness, and work with. And they’ve really built such a rapport as a company, which means they really are a band now. Watch this space for secret Sugar Coat gigs…

Are there any specific challenges when it comes to directing gig theatre? 

It’s a delicate balancing act. Lean too hard on the ‘gig’ and you could end up with something quite static, or the narrative could feel thin compared to the music. Lean too hard on the ‘theatre’ and the music could feel incidental, or like an afterthought.

We’ve worked really hard to make the symbiotic nature of this piece really work, so that we aren’t saddling together to disparate aspects of a show, and instead really embedding the story in the music, and the music in the story. It’s a challenge, but one full of rewards, and makes for a really exhilarating piece of work. My hope is that it becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It’s an exciting genre to be working in.

What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see Sugar Coat?

You won’t regret it. Don’t miss out kids. We are incredible proud of this show, and it’s honestly been one of the highlights of my creative life working on it, so I truly could not recommend it highly enough.

I think these days we need something a bit special from our trips out of the house, and my god do you get that with Sugar Coat. The sexiness of it, the music, the glamour, and then the sheer heart of the thing. It’s a real suckerpunch. So hopefully we’ll see you soon at Southwark Playhouse!