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British cabaret and opera star Le Gateau Chocolat, who performs next month with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, uses drag to reach his audience’s hearts. By Santilla Chingaipe.
Cabaret performer Le Gateau Chocolat
Cabaret, opera and drag star Le Gateau Chocolat is feeling reflective. He’s just returned to his home in London from Germany, where he performed with the Hamburg State Opera. A video on his Instagram shows the final moments of his performance, filmed by someone in the wings.
In a regal blue gown with matching cape, Gateau belts out the final lyrics from Nina Simone’s “Four Women”, accompanied by the orchestra: “I’m awfully bitter these days / Cos my parents were slaves / What do they call me? / My name is Peaches.” The orchestra stops just before Gateau ends the song. He takes a breath and slumps while the audience sits in silence, stunned.
“Saying those words in Hamburg in front of a German audience, and that being divergent from what they think or know drag is, was so shocking to both them and me,” he says. “I can also see that my rage is effervescent. When I get to that point, no one makes a sound. There’s no clapping, there’s no tittering, there’s nothing. And those three seconds of silence feels like an eternity.”
For Gateau, the performance revealed the physical and emotional weight of playing to predominantly white audiences. “In those spaces where it’s almost always 99 per cent white, I also now realise the cost,” he says. “I mean, I’ve known of the cost, but now my heart tells me of the cost ... In that moment, I was absolutely artistically drained. But the day after, I felt like I’d been hit by a bus.”
Last December, Gateau was diagnosed with heart failure. It required a defibrillator that was implanted last month. That affects not just how he lives his life but how he performs. “At 43 now, the brain and the body aren’t as elastic as they used to be,” he tells me. “Like, I can’t just get up and do it, especially with this new heart condition. I’m very, very aware of the cost. I can and must make decisions about where I extend that cost, and if people make it worth my while, emotionally, mentally, financially – if there is support, if there is an understanding – because I honestly can’t start from zero in terms of having to explain.”
Fortunately for Australia, he’s decided it’s worth coming here. Gateau has been visiting Australia – a “second creative home” – since 2008. He will return this month to help conclude the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s 50th anniversary season with the concert Cocteau’s Circle, which explores the music and milieu of 1920s Paris and is named for a towering figure of that milieu, French poet, playwright, librettist and artist Jean Cocteau. It will tour nationally from November 8-22, starring Chocolat as maître d’, and Australian soprano Chloe Lankshear, with direction by Circa’s Yaron Lifschitz.
Le Gateau Chocolat was born in West London as George Ikediashi and raised in Nigeria. His mother was studying accounting in Britain when she gave birth to him and his sister, before she returned to Nigeria with the children.
He grew up in a religious home: his father was Catholic and his mother was Pentecostal. “I remember fervent prayers to God about wanting to be a singer,” he says.
He returned to England as a teenager. “I noticed the massive difference between being in Nigeria until I was 16 and then moving back to England.” How so? “In Nigeria, I’m not Black. That’s not part of my identity. In Nigeria, I’m just me. But in any other country where my race isn’t the majority, I am racialised as Black. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have anything else to worry about in Nigeria, like being camp or being gay or whatever, but there is an inherent security of being home that I have nowhere else.”
After returning to England, he continued his studies and received a law degree. “When you’re Nigerian or when you’re African, there’s this whole thing about aspirations,” he says. “There are many things that are left from – and I won’t say kind of scars of coming from a country that was colonised – a country that’s part of the Commonwealth. And a lot of that has to do with status. And that status manifests in having children who have a vocation or a title that’s respected. So that’s like doctor, lawyer, engineer, pilot, accountant, manager – anything that has a title that gives your parents or your family the opportunity to pop out their chests.”
He never practised law – even though he says he would have made a good lawyer – because at university he discovered the world of cabaret. “There was a club night called Dynamite Boogaloo,” he remembers. “Every Thursday, it went 10 till two, and I was there every Thursday.”
After he had attended a few shows, one of the performers heard him singing and suggested he take to the stage. “And then she gave me a gold kaftan and an afro and then another performer gave me pink lipstick and that pink lipstick was my eyeshadow, blusher and lipstick, and so I was able to go on in two minutes,” he says. “And that was sort of where I was born. I had no idea that this world existed. I’d never seen anything like it.”
Since then, Gateau has built a successful international career that spans drag, cabaret, opera, musical theatre and live art. He was part of the Olivier-winning show La Clique and has performed in many productions, including Twelfth Night at the Globe Theatre and as a baritone at Glyndebourne, at Carnegie Hall, the Royal Albert Hall and the Barbican. But, he says, he’s always been a drag queen.
“Growing up in Nigeria, I was a camp kid. I was one of the fatter kids, almost always the bigger one in my year,” says Gateau. “I learnt to be chameleonic, to distract people through comedy, because I was bullied a lot. I now realise that my ability to be in drag came very, very early on, because it was about my identity and how I could read a room and understand what that room needed.”
Does he find drag liberating? “Absolutely. People I think often go to drag expecting there to be comedy, and I think there is inherent comedy in it because it’s about caricature. I know that’s going to shake your belief system, but yeah, maybe you’ll leave having learnt something new.”
I found clips online of Gateau performing over the years dressed in various glamorous outfits with wigs and bold make-up. Watching him sing challenges my own assumptions of what I’ve come to think of as drag. “Audiences’ expectation of what drag is, is almost always not what I am,” he says. “If I make them laugh, for instance, I always know that them laughing gives me access to their hearts. When they’re laughing and all of a sudden their hearts and ears and their chakras are open, and then I can deliver a message as powerful as ‘Four Women’.”
In 2019, Le Gateau Chocolat performed at the Bayreuth Festival in Bavaria and was booed at the curtain call by conservative Wagner enthusiasts in the crowd. “I got booed. Of a cast of 132 people, the only Black person. The only Black person to then walk onstage and then be booed by white Germans,” he recalls.
“And the building had zero capacity in any vocabulary in [knowing] how to deal with that. Nothing. Like, what do you need? How do you respond? Do you want to talk about this? Is there a paper? Do you think if we approach this, do you want a right of reply? Do you want to talk to someone about this? Nothing.” Frustrated by the lack of institutional support following the traumatic event, Gateau took to social media.
“Dear Bayreuth,” he wrote. “What a night. To be the ONLY character; Le Gateau Chocolat as Le Gateau Chocolat, (non speaking or singing role) to be boo’ed, on that stage, says a lot about who you (still) are. The creative team were fervent in their quest to preserve and showcase my queer identity so that everything we presented on that stage was truthful and authentic. Thank you, boys. Love and respect. In the context of what we created, I represent an identity that was/is, evidently, alien to a lot of you but one that provided Tannhauser with release, relief, joy, distraction and the antithesis to the establishment. AND an embodiment of young Wagner’s own words – ‘Free in willing, free in action, free in pleasure.’ ”
His post went viral, attracting a wave of racist and homophobic abuse. Commentators weighed in from all over the world. “I remember even an Australian journalist in Sydney wrote about the incident,” says Gateau. “And in his article, he says [that] because I’m au fait with how the online community works, I’m able to corral people around me and rally people to my support. [He said] that I wasn’t booed.
“He literally gaslights me from Sydney and he was not present. So not only was he not present when somebody set up an email address that was [email protected]. The email that the person sent me was just the N-word. That’s all that was in the email. Or when someone doxxed me on Twitter. That’s how angry they were about me.”
This experience changed how Gateau shows up in public: “Whilst I might have been gifted the opportunity and the platform to sing, I believe that the gift also comes with a responsibility in terms of representing people who look like me, who are not in these spaces, but also the opportunity to converse with people through the medium of music and also educate them about what it is to traverse this planet looking like me.”
Gateau hopes that his visibility empowers other young people to authentically be themselves. He admits he came out to his mother only two years ago. “The first time my mum saw me perform [was] in Hyde Park in London. She’s there with my sister, some of my friends, some people I went to school with, and I come out to perform, and I say to the audience: ‘Hi people, Mama Chocolat is here somewhere. This is the first time she’s seen me perform.’ ”
When he spotted his mother in the crowd, he waved. After the performance, audience members began to take photos with her. “I now have hundreds of photos of my mum with complete strangers who just kind of go, ‘Oh, my God, you don’t understand how long, I mean, we followed him for so long and we can’t believe that you don’t know! How could you not know?’ ” He laughs.
Gateau is looking forward to the collaboration with the ACO. “I think that there is something anarchic about drag,” he says. “I think that there’s something transgressive about drag. The reason why I say ‘yes’ to institutions that I haven’t worked with before or people who I haven’t worked with before, is the genuine opportunity to collaborate and create something new.
“They will push me in ways that I might not have been pushed before, and so I’ll learn some skills, and I’ll push them in ways that big minds haven’t pushed before … There will be a sharing of ideas as artists and makers to tell this story about Cocteau in the ’20s.”
Audiences, he says, can expect to be entertained. “Get ready to be surprised or shook. I’m not going to be doing coarse humour or jokes. That’s not my role, and that’s not what you’d be getting.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 18, 2025 as "Queen of the night".
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