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Bullied as a child for being different, Paul Capsis – set to star in Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis – rose to become one of Australia’s iconic theatre artists. By Anna Snoekstra.

Paul Capsis: from bullied child to beloved performer

Performer Paul Capsis.

Credit: Abraham de Souza

Although Australian theatre icon Paul Capsis is an extravagant performer today, he was a quiet child. “I had worlds in my head that I saw or that I wanted to see and wanted to create,” he says. “I thought the real world was harsh or was too difficult, so I just went into my head. It wasn’t really until I had to go to school that everything seemed to clash. I couldn’t escape into those private, unseen worlds.”

With his cultural background, his small frame and effeminate voice, Capsis had a difficult time in the late 1960s and 1970s at his inner-city Sydney public school. He was bullied, verbally and physically. “I was in a whole other violent world. You couldn’t win,” he says. “You know, you looked weird, you sounded weird. They found out your mum’s from Malta, and your father is Greek from Egypt. So you’re the enemy. Your physicality is wrong. Your voice is wrong. Everything’s wrong.”

This profound sense of difference informs his interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, which he’ll perform later this month in an intimate production with a live cello accompaniment at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne.

In what was later called “the first celebrity trial”, Wilde – then at the height of his fame – was imprisoned for gross indecency in 1895, after a notorious trial in which the Irish dramatist sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel. Queensberry was the father of his lover, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, and had called Wilde a sodomite. Wilde lost the trial and was instead prosecuted himself. He was eventually found guilty and imprisoned for two years in Reading Gaol, where the writing of stories or plays was forbidden, although he was allowed to write letters.

So began De Profundis (Latin for “from the depths”), Wilde’s 50,000-word letter to Bosie. The letter was both a bitter proclamation of love and betrayal as well as a meditation on art and self-revelation. Severely weakened by his treatment in jail, Wilde died three years later, aged 46.

“Just reading Oscar Wilde’s words, his profound take on the world back then, I think … not a lot has changed. It’s very affecting,” Capsis tells me from his home in Sydney. “He wrote this letter to Bosie, but he wrote about the universe, he wrote about God, he wrote about hierarchy and the system of privilege. He had a lot of rage and grief because he had to sit with himself in that cell and reflect on everything in his life. The humiliation of falling from his position in society as a successful writer. It was like that thing of people say, ‘Oh, they’re just waiting for you to fall on your face.’ ”

The last time Capsis performed at fortyfivedownstairs was in Cameron Lukey’s production of Quentin Crisp’s life, Resident Alien. As with that production, Capsis has fully immersed himself in the artist’s work to prepare. “It’s life lessons, you know, through art,” he says. “It’s Quentin Crisp’s work, Oscar Wilde’s work, they were outsiders, acknowledged outsiders, knowing well their place in society and in the world. They’re both very honest and brutal about the situation and not sugar-coating it. I have a similar view of the world.”

Capsis is candid when he shares his own experiences. He was raised with a strong matriarchal influence: his parents divorced when he was young and he and his mother lived with his grandmother, Angela, whom he describes as his rock and who gave him unconditional love.

At school, he became very self-conscious and shy. He found companionship with a teacher, Mrs Haskell, who played him vinyl records and encouraged him to perform. Capsis often sang and danced at family weddings, where it was culturally celebrated, but this didn’t transfer well to an Australian public school. “She got me to belly dance in front of the school assembly in my grey uniform. It was a massive oops,” he remembers. “I was already viewed in a particular way, but that pretty much stained me for the rest of my school life. And that went on into high school. In the mid ’70s, back then, in Surry Hills, that experience for me was like a prison.

“What I’m talking about is a very common experience for thousands and thousands of people, but, at the time, you think it’s just you. You think, What is wrong with me? That was my dilemma. So interestingly enough, reading Quentin Crisp or Oscar Wilde, you think, My God, this has been going on since Jesus was a baby.”

Capsis found ways to survive the rest of his school years. His teachers would lock him in the art room during lunchbreaks so students couldn’t harass or attack him. He spent the time reading about his idols and making art, such as a super 8 film using photographs of Janis Joplin. “I was obsessed with this woman, you know, who was already dead,” he says. “I was fascinated by her appearance. She looked so wild to me. I became fixated on her. And then I listened to her sing and that did a whole other thing for me. It spoke to me of what I was.”

He was struck by more similarities. Joplin was also an outsider as a teenager and was bullied mercilessly at her public high school in Port Arthur, Texas. And like Capsis, she refused to conform. “Instead of trying to play the game, trying to make herself like women of those times, she went the opposite way,” he says. “So I identified with that, instead of trying to pretend I was a male being male, which I didn’t understand and did not relate to.

“My voice gave everything away. I didn’t know how to make people not look at me. As I got older, later in high school, I became more defiant. A lot of that was the courage I got from reading about Janice. But they weren’t good things, you know? I mean, right up until she was at university she was laughed at. I guess that hurt and it informed her whole life and what she did until her death.”

Capsis uses he/him pronouns, but for as long as he can remember he did not accept the label of “male”. As a child, his parents insisted he was a boy and wouldn’t let him wear what he wanted. His grandmother would secretly allow him to wear feminine clothes because she believed it was just a phase. “I was very mortified when I found out I was male, and then had to deal with it. There was none of this language [we have now].

“I don’t know how to put this, but I just, I don’t want to weaponise what I am. What I had to do, difficult or not, is… I had to get on with life and figure it out. Deal with it, you know. I think, in a way, it’s good that people have words and ways to describe it. If I was young now, I’d call myself a non-binary person. The truth of the matter is, that’s exactly what I am. But at my age, I’m personally tired of the titles. I want to get on with being in the world.”

After Capsis left high school, he joined Shopfront Theatre, an indie theatre space that works with developing young performers. Here he finally found a place where he felt safe to explore the extravagance and boldness that he so respected in his idols. “It was incredible,” he says. “I found a world of acceptance.”

He travelled internationally, both with Shopfront and on his own, which changed him further. His view had been informed by his mother’s belief that the world was a terrible place: “I was very afraid of the world after high school; I was raised to not trust people,” he says. On his travels he visited Malta and being immersed in his grandmother’s culture and surrounded by people who looked like him allowed him to feel even more connected.

He returned to Australia transformed, willing to take risks and be bold. Unsure how to navigate the world of commercial theatre, he began to book his own drag performances. “I just put myself in a dress and started to sing live in bars. And that led to pretty much everything, really.”

This was the early 1980s and Capsis was the first person he knew to perform live in drag. He frequented The Albury Hotel’s piano bar and was accompanied by pianist Stuart Farrance, who went by the drag name Sigourney. Capsis went by Paula Peril.

He performed everywhere he could. Once, in full Janis Joplin drag, he performed at a bikers’ club. The bikers threatened him onstage, but in his drag persona he was unafraid and “gave them hell back”. Backstage he was told it wasn’t safe for him to leave because the bikers were waiting for him with chains. “I took off my wig and all my make-up, and I had short hair then, so I was able to quickly go through the venue and they didn’t recognise me.”

Capsis vaulted into the public eye in 1992, when he performed to great acclaim in The Cockroach Opera at Belvoir Street Theatre. He has since performed in theatre and cabaret on both main and indie stages across Australia, including a coruscating one-man show directed by Barrie Kosky, Boulevard Delirium, a hit at Vienna’s Schauspielhaus Wien and Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre. He has also featured in films such as Head On (1998) and Carlotta (2014).

Capsis has written or co-written many of his own productions, including the award-winning Angela’s Kitchen, a solo performance about his grandmother’s life and their close relationship. Yet after all these accolades, he still meets people today who remember him most as Paula Peril, dancing and singing on top of a piano with the ceiling fan perilously close to his head.

Now 61, Capsis often still feels judged and profiled because of how he sounds and looks. “I don’t accept it, not at my age,” he tells me. “Even when I was young, I just felt like people didn’t have the right to try and make me feel bad about who I am for whatever their reason, and I feel the same way now. I’m very much like my mother now, I’m very outspoken. If you mess with me, I’ll confront you.”

Like Wilde, Capsis refuses to sugar-coat or repress the negative experiences of his existence. In De Profundis, Wilde writes about accepting both the good and bad in his life. When he was first imprisoned, Wilde says, he was advised to forget who he was, which was “ruinous”, because remembering himself was the only thing that brought him comfort.

He was then told he should attempt to forget ever being in jail once he was released, which he believed would be equally fatal. “It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else – the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver – would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy,” Wilde wrote.

“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 23, 2025 as "Denying nothing".

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