INTERVIEW: A Digital Pint with… Ania Upstill, on Shakespeare’s Queerest Character, ‘Antonio!’

We last caught up with Ania Upstill when they were performing with Butch Mermaid Productions at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2023. Their shows Antonio! and A Bit Too Much Hair were amongst our favourite Queer musical extravaganzas we caught that year, and now Ania and their co-stars are bringing Antonio! all the way to Adelaide Fringe next week.

We caught up with Ania for a pixelated pint to dive into Shakespeare’s Queerest Character, what inspired them to create the piece, and how it’s been going since. Join us here in the Binge Fringe Virtual Pub.

You can catch Antonio! at Hetzel Room (at State Library) at The Courtyard of Curiosities at the Migration Museum as part of Adelaide Fringe from Tuesday 11th March until Sunday 16th March at 7:30pm (60mins). Tickets are available through the Adelaide Fringe Box Office.

Jake: Hi Team! We last caught Antonio at Edinburgh Fringe which we absolutely loved, tell us about the journey the show has been on since then.

Ania: Since Edinburgh the show has only gotten better. I did an Artistic Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. in July last year, which meant spending a month researching pirates, queer people and musicians on ships for a month. As a creative team, we then did some work on the show, and Antonio! is now not only more historically accurate, it’s also sexier and funnier than ever.

Later last year, we also had a sold-out Concert Reading of the Antonio! in New York City in December at Bedlam’s new space. In mid-February we opened to a standing ovation in NZ Fringe, we did Antonio! in the Hamilton Arts Festival, and now we’re at Adelaide Fringe! We have an absolutely star-studded line up of Kiwi talent on this current tour, and the reviews and audience responses have been epic.

Jake: Tell us about what inspired you to create a queer punk pirate history about this particular literary figure.

Ania: It was really the combination of my interests in queer history and in Shakespeare. I’m not the first person to read the character Antonio in Twelfth Night as queer, so part of the inspiration is right there in the text, but I decided to take it further. There are four different Antonios (and one Anthony) in the Shakespearean canon, and I just thought, writers often had muses. What if there was a real-life gay pirate who inspired these characters? How cool would that be?

Usually I research real-life queer people, but in this case I decided to do more of what could be called a ‘speculative fiction’ approach, based on the idea of asking “what if” (essentially, “what if Shakespeare had a muse called Antonio who was a queer pirate? What would his life have been like?). Since queer people are so often left out of the historical record – and are most commonly documented when they are being prosecuted – one of the only ways to imagine ourselves in the past is to speculate. As I’ve done more research, I’ve become more convinced that Antonio could actually have existed; and I feel like I can make a pretty strong argument about what that would have looked like.

Ania did an interview with RNZ earlier this year about exactly this question! You can hear it here.

Jake: What are you hoping the audience might take away from the experience, if anything?

You: That people get to create their own narratives and live a life that they can define for themselves. Also, the knowledge that queer people existed in the past, and that we have the right to exist today.

Jake: Now we’re in the throes of Adelaide Fringe, what are you most excited for?

Ania: I love the absolute chaos of a Fringe, especially getting to stumble into shows I would never otherwise see. You never know what will happen or who you’ll meet – last time I was at Adelaide Fringe I met a nurse doing a stand up show about incontinence and it was EXCELLENT.

Jake: Given the themes of Binge Fringe, if your show was a beverage of any kind (alcoholic, non-alcoholic – be as creative as you like!), what would it be and why?

Ania: I love a themed drink, so I’m going to make one up for a character in the musical. Our beverage would be a cocktail called the Don Pedro made from Madeira wine, Oranges, and spices. A little overpowering, sweet but deadly, just like its namesake.

You can catch Antonio! at Hetzel Room (at State Library) at The Courtyard of Curiosities at the Migration Museum as part of Adelaide Fringe from Tuesday 11th March until Sunday 16th March at 7:30pm (60mins). Tickets are available through the Adelaide Fringe Box Office.