Series Two, Episode Three - Cherrelle Skeete & Shiloh Coke (Part 1)

Series Two, Episode Three - Cherrelle Skeete & Shiloh Coke (Part 1)

(Part 2 will be released next Monday)

LAURA: So if you could both give us a little bit of background about how you got into acting and what your start in the industry was. We’ll start with Cherrelle.

CHERRELLE: So I’m from Birmingham, so I started off at the dance company. I started off making dance routines and then apparently I was doing something called “physical theatre”, then I thought, oh, okay. I sing as well, and then someone told me I should go to drama school. Ultimately I was like, I need to leave this city. I need to go to the Big Smoke, to London and I went to a community theatre company and they gave me a list of all these drama schools that I’d heard of but I thought only posh white people went to them. So I was like, ah, okay. So I managed, back in those days, to gets a grant to be able to afford a train ticket and to pay for my audition fees and to get to London because it’s expensive, right? So the first time round I think I auditioned for RADA, Central on the MT course. Didn’t have a clue what I was doing, blagged my whole way through, didn’t get in, didn’t deserve to get in. And then the second time round it was actually from going to Central and auditioning for MT - we do this tour around the school and one of the courses was CDT. I always say it sounds like some sort of venereal disease, I didn’t know what it was, but I loved it because we literally had to watch a plastic bag go up in the air and then be the plastic bag and I was like, ‘Oh! This is what acting is? I could do this! I get a degree to be a plastic bag, brilliant! I’m gonna do that. If I don’t get in, I’m gonna do that next time round.’ And then people were like, ‘Oh, read more about Pina Bausch and Suzuki.’ You know, all of that. I kind of really got into it. I started to do some bits of a research, tried to watch some Shakespeare during that time that year. And then the second time round on my UCAS i just put Central CDT. Because I thought, I don’t want to go anywhere else, it’s really expensive to audition for other places, and by this point I couldn’t get another grant, so I was like I need to just hit it one time and get in, otherwise I’ve got to start again the following year. And I got in, and yeah. That was that. I got to run around and be fire whilst saying Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice, and then we had to do a devised piece as our final piece. So yeah, that’s how I got into it, and I suppose at Central a lot of the courses are Jacques Lecoq based, which I still use now. It was just great for me to have like a physical way into acting, because I’m dyslexic. I didn’t know at the time. I love reading, but I’m so slow at reading. Sitting down and studying and highlighting and marking, like that for me was just a big put off. So a physical response to my environment was the best way for me to get into it, and after that it hasn’t really mattered, but it’s a tool I use in terms of devising musical theatre and straight plays and stuff.

And it’s just about — I suppose for me it was the way I wanted to train at the time. Which

equipped me, yeah. I mean it was still traumatic.

Laughter

LAURA: Why was it traumatic?

CHERRELLE: I mean any kind of vocational course that you’re doing, where it’s not just academic … first of all, I’m in a new city. I was like 19, 20, moving to London on my own, no family around, dealing with housing and all that kind of stress. And discovering that you can’t take out your Oyster card once you get to the barrier, you need to have it ready cos there’ll be a queue of people shouting at you. And the crowds. So dealing with all of those big changes, those environmental changes while still being a young person. On top of that, stepping into an environment where I felt as thought I was a tiny tiny fish in an ocean. It made me realise just how very working class I was, how black I was, how West Indian I was … there were just so many differences that made me almost kind of go into my shell, because I didn’t see a lot of people that were like me, or that I could have that sense of community in that environment. I realise how important community is now, hence why Blacktress exists.

But yeah. At that time I used to go back to Birmingham every weekend because I just thought, five days a week in this place, I need those two days to be back to where I'm seen as ... I'm in an environment where I’m seen as normal, I'm in a normalised environment as opposed to being the loud one or the northern one - I'm not from the North, I’m from the Midlands - you know, the ghetto one, whatever it is in terms of how people outside of my own experience saw me. And I tried not to not take on that label and too much. What played on my mind the first few weeks was, am I here because I tick both boxes because I'm both black and female? I don't see many people that look like me, and they're probably going to put my face on their prospectus so they can tick their diversity box. I wasn't quite sure if I was there because I was talented. And I went home and I was speaking to some friends and they said, ‘Well, Cherrelle, if you are there to fill a quota, make the most of your opportunity, because a lot of people don't get those opportunities.’ Like I say, all these grants that were available to me as a working class person, as a young person from Birmingham, are no longer available. So I know that I am very very privileged, and that's why I had to use my privilege to make waves for other people, especially those people that are outside of London I realise… gosh… London really is so saturated, and I go back to Birmingham and there’s not a lot of things happening.

GEORGIA: I find it that for people from regional places it doesn't seem as accessible to come and train, and that whole thing of a train fare … even getting down with the train fare for a recall or whatever -

CHERRELLE: Accommodation.

GEORGIA: Yeah, accommodation. These are the things that knock people out of the game at the first hurdle, straight away.

CHERRELLE: I couldn't even explain it to my mum because she didn't understand it, so I knew it was on me to try and figure out ways of doing it. And that's why I'm so passionate about grassroots projects because it wasn’t big institutions like the Birmingham Rep that helped me, it was my community. Small black community theatre companies, who would have come up back during the 80s, during Thatcher's times, who were successful and now they've kind of fallen on hard times but they still try to make amends with what they have. Those were the people that supported me and were like, ‘Okay, we’re doing a small production in this town but come along.’ And they gave me the time, and talked to me, and I could create. Someone was laying the foundations for me to be creatively confident and creatively free. So I’d kind of be like, ‘Yeah, I'm going to put on dance piece. I'm going to write a poem and do it.’ I know I'm so critical of myself now, it's like I'm trying to get back to that place where I was a lot more free. I wasn't kind of thinking that the end product needs to look like this, which I suppose with drama school that's what you're kind of - obviously you're interested in process, but you want the end product to be perfect, and there’s no such thing as perfect. But I kind of want to undo some of that learning in order to get back to what I was like before I went to drama school. It’s finding that balance of being able to fuck shit up. Otherwise you are just regurgitating something already exists. How are we ever gonna push the boundaries of art and creativity by us self-censoring ourselves all the time.

LAURA: I think there's a particular pressure when it's like marginalised groups making art as well because there's so much pressure on it to be ... if it's not brilliant, the people in power will be like, that doesn't work, we won't do that again. Whereas I just don't think that's the case for white men, generally.

SHILOH: Nobody judges the next thing that they do from the fact that what they did last wasn't … you know, they'll still get a job.

CHERRELLE: They'll still get a job.

SHILOH: Yeah.

CHERRELLE: How many male actors do we know even in Hollywood, you speak to people, we hear some kind of anecdote, when you hear a person saying, ‘Oh yeah, that person’s an arsehole.’ Next thing they’re in the next big Hollywood film! And you're like, ‘What?’

I feel like we’re in the - we call the millennials snowflakes, we’re the generation that complain about things, but I feel like we’re also the generation that call things out. We call things out, and we're actually taking action. We’re the generation of young creatives who - well, like I say, even for me I was like the last kind of dregs that got those grants and got cheaper student fees and stuff and it was like the year after it just kind of skyrocketed and it’s really mad.

GEORGIA: It's just absolutely mental. Like if I'd have gotten in the first time I tried to drama school, because I tried for 3 years, I would have got the cheaper fees. By the time I got in, the fees were nine grand a year, but because I'd worked before I had money to support me though it. I can't believe now that I'm in 46 grand debt. Like when I went to look at my bank account and have managed to pay off a bit of my student loan overdraft online, and I'll get it out like that, and oh wait hang on I've got nearly fifty grand to pay some point.

SHILOH: That just gave me instant like -

CHERRELLE: I don't even think about that. It doesn't exist. But hey, I think we're definitely… listen, those old style white, we’re here to fuck shit up man. Because listen they've benefited from a system that we don't benefit from. We're having to literally tear it down and rebuild it in the way that everyone benefits, you know. So, yeah man. We're not in a time where we can be indifferent. I was speaking to my friend last night and she said, you're either a colonizer or a healer. We all have a tool, we all have a mission, we all have a resource that we can use to heal. The fact that we're doing this, you know, this is a healing space. What you guys are doing is healing, so.

GEORGIA: (To Shiloh) So we haven't found out your -

SHILOH: See how I’ve just been listening, I’m just interested to hear.

LAURA: So, Shiloh, how did you get into the industry?

SHILOH: I wanted to be a lawyer as a kid, and then I realised I'm so heavily dyslexic and I hate reading. One of my cousins is a lawyer and the amount of books that he had to read, I was like, I need to rethink this. I really need to rethink this. And I wanted to be a performer but I wasn't quite sure -

GEORGIA: And play a lawyer.

SHILOH: And play a lawyer! that's what I wanted to do all my god I want to play her daughter who then grows up to be a lawyer. What's her name? Give me a job. Shonda Rhimes! Shonda, give me a job.

GEORGIA: She's definitely listening to this.

SHILOH: She's listening, I know she is. Yes. I wanted to be a lawyer but then I threw that idea away, and then I wanted to be a performer, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a musician or an actor or a singer. I come from a musical family, both my parents are musicians and I've grown up with that influence. I grew up playing instruments from a young age, and being in a Steel Band as a kid, which kept me off the streets and doing something productive every summer, which was great because it meant that a lot of my friends were out till 1 in the morning smoking on roadsides and I was in the pan yard playing a 10 minute long song at 120bpm, which is really fast. I wanted to do that, and then I started going to a performing arts class once a week and I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed learning how to improvise and I really loved doing comedic scratches and I really - I'm using the word really a lot, stop using the word really, Shiloh. It was fun, it was a lot of fun. And then I went to college and did performing arts there, and then started to play my instruments some more. Because when your parents do anything, if that's an influence in your life, you're either going to go from either extreme. So I play the piano like religiously seven days a week and then I didn't play for like six months and then I started picking up singing and songwriting when I was at college.

One of my drama teachers at college, he walked in the room and I was playing something on the piano and said, ‘You're really good.’ I was like, ‘Thanks.’ I was this little streetwise teenager with like a bandana on and a tracksuit, and yeah. It was great because that teacher, he ... I really felt supported and believed in by him, and he went to drama school so everybody started applying in our last year of college. I didn't get to go to any open days, but one of my friends went to Rose Bruford and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, Shiloh, there’s a course that I think you'd really like. It's got people playing instruments and shit. I know it's right up your street, check it out.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds fun!’ and I went online and I read the course description and for the first time in my life it was like, oh my god, this sounds really cool. And then following that there was like another open day in June and I went, and you get to go into different rooms, into different classes. We went into a class and it was some students playing instruments and they were rehearsing a musical, and it was like, wow, this is really cool. This is where I wanna be, because I really love music, I really love acting.

My mum gave me £250 to pay for all of the drama schools that I wanted to apply to and I’d paid for them already. And I was really grateful because my mum, with the help of my grandmother, raised me, but she’s working class and everything that she has she’s earned herself. They didn’t have the privilege of having money in the family before she was born. My grandma came to England in the 1940s or ‘30s so she didn’t really have much, but she ended up doing so such in that time and having nine children to support. So I was so grateful to my mum for doing that, but at the time I didn’t really understand the levels of it. The only one I really wanted to audition for was Rose Bruford anyway, and I went … I remember going to LAMDA and going, ‘Yeah, so tell me about the music side of it, because it has M in your …’ I was literally before, while Cherrelle was talking, I was like LAMDA it’s, um, London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, so I was like, ‘Yeah, what’s the musical side?’ Like, ‘Yeah, we don’t do music.’ I was like ‘WHY YOU LYING!’

GEORGIA: Why are you lying in the title?

SHILOH: False advertising! You know what I mean? Ugh! Flips the table, storms out of the audition.

Laughter

SHILOH: So I went to drama school at Rose Bruford on the actor-musician course, and, um, it’s a beautiful course, but it’s in the middle of Hell.

Laughter

It’s called “Shitcup”, and you step off the train -- it’s like going to Hogwarts. You have to step into Hell and then when you get to the gates of Rose Bruford it’s like going through platform 9 and

¾, and you step onto the campus and there’s geese and there’s a lake and there’s the beautiful Lamorbey building that in summer you sit on the grass. Somehow in Sidcup it didn’t rain that much, looking back on it, it was sunny quite a bit and you get to chill with the geese. Don’t touch the baby geese cos you’ll get attacked, one of my friends found out the hard way which was much to my amusement.

CHERRELLE: Sidcup’s EDL country.

SHILOH: Oh god it is. And I get kind of panicked when I see, is it the British flag?

CHERRELLE: St George’s flag.

SHILOH: St George’s flag. Because like there were houses that had St George’s flag and I was like, ‘Yo, I need to go home. This is not a thing.’ And my friend was like, ‘Shi, do you wanna stop over?’ after a party cos the last train back into London Bridge is like eleven and I wanted to chill, and he was like, ‘No, but you can stop over at mine!’ and I was like, ‘Nah, have you seen your neighbours? They’re skinheads and they’ve got St George’s flag outside their house, I’d rather not.’

It’s traumatic being … I’d stretch it out to say quite a few people of colour I know had a similar experience, but the black students that went there - it was scary. There were no other black females in my year, and there was a time when I was in second year when there were no black women in the year above me or below me so I was essentially the only black female in the school on an accredited course, which was scary. It was really scary. As much as I celebrate that school, that was traumatic. A lot of my friends were from communities where they hadn’t been in such close proximity to someone like me, and they have to gauge their own racism and not know when they’re being racist, and me being like, ‘That’s not cool.’ And them being like, ‘Why? But we’re mates though.’ Like, ‘Yo, Shi, yo!’ and doing all these hand signs and I’m like, ‘I’ve never done that in my entire life, what are you doing?’ Me talking how I am and they’re like you know, ‘But you’re from Brixton, tho, innit.’ And I’m like, ‘No. I’m from North West London, I’m from Harlesden please stop it.’

GEORGIA: Do you feel like you had to spend a lot of time then educating people?

SHILOH: No, because I got tired of it. My closest friends, I’d just hang out with them. Instinctively on the first day of school, I’d be like, okay, I know I’m a minority. And for the first time in my life, I’m in the minority, living in London. In my community, everybody looks like me. And coming here where I’m not the majority … but it’s something else as to why I feel so uncomfortable. So instinctively, you notice people who look like you. And those were the people who you’d naturally just gel with. One of my really good friends, I met him because I was sitting in the cafe on the first day of induction, because I didn’t go to freshers.

CHERRELLE: I didn’t do freshers.

SHILOH: Why am I gonna do freshers?

CHERRELLE: I couldn’t afford to be in London for that week! To get drunk.

SHILOH: I’ve got my old friends to get drunk with, thanks. So I was sitting on my own, like, nobody looks like me here, feeling bad.

CHERRELLE: There’s no place like home!

SHILOH: Exactly, there’s no place like home! Literally. And then I looked up and there was a guy in the corner and he did a head nod at me, and I didn’t say anything back and he was like, ‘Ah, come over.’ So I went and sat near him, he was like, ‘Oh, are you -- what’s your name, whereabouts are you from?’ We made friends, his name’s Ray, and we stayed together for the rest of the day. Everyone was like, ‘Oh, how do you guys know each other? Did you guys know each other before?’ And I was like, ‘No, we met today. But he’s my friend.’ He’s still an incredible friend now, he’s a good mate, big him up. He supported me as much as the other guys in my year.

There were three other black males in my year group that supported me so much in my experience being at drama school and I was so grateful for that. I still am now. Because I look back at the experience and think, wow, it would have been so much harder if you weren’t there. And having grown up in london, it’s like, I don’t understand why I deel like an outsider here because we’re still in London. This makes no sense to me.

GEORGIA: How long ago did you go to drama school?

SHILOH: I went to drama school in 2011, and graduated 2014. So not that long ago at all. But yeah, that was … drama school was, yeah, I can’t lie, I got cool roles when I was there, I learnt how to be a bigger and better jack of all trades, I picked up a few instruments. The only instrument i was classically trained on was the violin, and I hate the violin. So that is off the CV forever.

LAURA: On that note, what were your respective experiences of the first year or two after leaving drama school.

CHERRELLE: Well, you’re very green aren’t you? Like, oh my god, the world is my oyster. But to be honest, for me, I think I was just happy. The first feeling I got was just happy to be out of drama school. So I left a term before -- I didn't do the final show with my class, I got a job at the Finborough theatre and it was called And I And Silence. It was a world premiere, so it was a very exciting four hander and it was an all female play and it ticked all the boxes in terms of my activism and looking at the issue of race and prison and we got to rehearse at Clean Break. So for me it was really a dream job for my first job, it felt safe and it felt creatively fulfilling and at the same time, I didn’t really get big roles when I was at drama school, so for me it was the first time I was like, oh my gosh, I’m not in the ensemble, people are looking at me. So that was my first job.

CHERRELLE: So that was my first job. And then I did workshops and I did stuff with Unicorn Theatre, lots of readings, and this was between me going back and forth to Birmingham, and my lovely landlady Rachel she kind of split my rent in half, who I was lodging with in Deptford, so I could be in Birmingham. So I was just going back and forth for auditions.

GEORGIA: That’s amazing.

CHERRELLE: Yeah, because I couldn’t afford it. Couldn’t afford it, it was too  expensive and i’d been working as a waitress. I’d go to Birmingham and work as a waitress and just come back for auditions and come on the Megabus, get up at like four in the morning to get like a six o’clock coach because it was like five pounds and my audition was at 10. And then my West End debut was in The Lion King, which was amazing because I’m getting to sing and I’m in The Lion King, it’s that show … I’ve grown up watching the film, couldn't afford to watch the show so it was the first time I actually watched the show, so I thought, brilliant. I was a swing and a cover. Do you know what a swing is?

GEORGIA: Yeah.

LAURA: I don’t really know what the difference is between a cover and a swing. GEORGIA: People who don’t do musical theatre don’t know what swings are.

CHERRELLE: Swings are the backbone of every West End show, so a swing has to cover - so if we were all in a show, a swing would, um … all of your like ensemble   stuff that you would do, a swing would cover all of those bits, so like your main principal role, like your main speaking part is your principal part. And a cover covers those parts, so I would play the part of Laura, and when I’m swinging I might also do the section that Georgia does when she moves this bit of prop and where she does this movement section in this costume, and I’m also split-tracking and doing a bit of Laura, and then I might do a bit of Shiloh when she comes on at the end and does that bit of movement and then she does a costume change. So you might be going on and doing three split-tracks. It’s mind-boggling.

GEORGIA: It’s actually amazing, though.

CHERRELLE: They call it swing brain, because it’s literally mathematical. The first six months I was having nightmares every night. I had a nightmare that I was due to go on as Pumba. It’s not even a track that I cover.

Laughter

CHERRELLE: I was like, but I don’t know it! Okay, ‘Hakuna Matata …!’ But I don’t know that! I don’t cover that! I remember having traumatic nightmares.

SHILOH: How long were rehearsals?

CHERRELLE: You’re constantly rehearsing. With that show - so the cover bit, brilliant. I covered Shenzi. Shenzi is the female hyena that Whoopi Goldberg plays, so that  was brilliant because I got to do puppetry. It was very physical, and straight away my CDT training comes up, puppetry and object manipulation, all that weird shit. Brilliant. Great. I can do that, that’s the easy stuff. The swinging stuff - wow. Swings are the least respected in the show but have to do the most work, basically. So the opening number would happen, and the principal ensemble, they’ll go on, they’ll still get paid, but if they call off, you have to go on. And you get told through a tannoy. You’ll be sitting here painting your nails, making a shopping list, and they’ll be like, ‘Cherrelle to the stage please, Cherrelle to the stage.’ (panicked breathing). You’ll be there with like your swing book trying to go over your numbers. You have like a few minutes from here all the way where you go downstairs to figure out what you’ve got to do. That was it, really, and then once I was in that show I was there for fourteen months, and then I went and did Amen Corner at the National Theatre, which was amazing.

SHILOH: That show was so dope.

CHERRELLE: That show changed my life.

SHILOH: Mine too.

CHERRELLE: It was amazing. It was great for me to be in the machine that is the   Lion King, the machine that is Disney, because it really opened my eyes to what commercial theatre is, and the difference between - the value in both doing fringe theatre as well as commercial theatre. And when you’re doing something like that,  how do you sustain and maintain yourself once you’re six months in and you know what you’re doing? I signed up at the Actor’s Centre, I was doing monologue training and stuff like that, and I would say that your training doesn't stop after drama school, that’s actually the start. The benefits of doing it for three years, you’re starting to really step and delve into your artistry, and finding your creative voice, and it’s after when you get out into  the real world - how are you able to do that when you haven’t got a teacher saying, ‘You’re not coming into class after 9 o’clock!’ You know. You have to be that to  yourself. So if you know that, hmm, okay, my voice is not doing too good, I need to book in with a voice teacher, or you know what, I’ve not taken a class in a while, I feel quite stiff, I need to go to the gym or go to Pineapple, or find a local Zumba class. I need to sit down and just read some plays for fun, and not just wait on an audition to come round because that’s when i’m gonna be creative. Ultimately your career is in your hands, and I learnt that very early on. And I’m really grateful, because I always say before I went to drama school I was doing a lot of community based arts things that meant that I didn’t have to rely on an agent or a casting director for me to be creative. I was always writing prose, writing monologues, and the community theatre group would always be like, ‘Go on, Cherrelle! Do it! Do it, do it.’ So I’d always had that. I suppose then getting paid West End money, I almost forgot for a moment. Then  I thought, no, hang on. I’ve always been creative. Just because it’s my job now, I need to find other ways of looking after my artist and creative self, so I need to do all these other things to support that. Because no one else is gonna do it. And that’s why I feel that affects a lot of artists, creatives, actors, after they leave drama school, because if  it doesn’t pan out the way you expect - if you’re not Denzel Washington, or flipping,  you know, whoever you idolise in the first year out, if you’re not in the next Spiderman film or the next Marvel film, if that isn’t your trajectory in the first five years or the first two years, you feel like a failure. And actually, no. What have you been doing? And a lot of the time we blame our agent, or we blame the casting director. What actually have you been doing towards your artist and creative self? You don’t need a license  for that.

SHILOH: We forget also what we did before we went to these institutions –

CHERRELLE: That led you to get there!

SHILOH: How did we stay creatively fulfilled before that? Because there was a  before. And that has played a massive part in how we’ve approached creating our own opportunities, especially with Blacktress and the John Thaw Initiative. How can we create our own opportunities, and stay doing that? Because the moment you start creating your own opportunities, that’s the time when your agent is calling off your phone, that’s the time when you don’t want them to call you because you’ve got other things to do that you were really enjoying. It’s the time when you’ve got a writing deadline, or you’re about to go on a gig with your band. That’s when those things happen and that’s good because you’re not relying just on them. How do we stay ready as actors and as performers?

CHERRELLE: Oh, read The Artist’s Way! Recommend it for those of you who are graduating. I would even start reading it as soon as you hit third year because everyone goes a bit crazy and loses a tonne of weight.

SHILOH: Second year is the hardest at drama school! Second year you’re doing everything. You’re crawling to the end of term. In second year I was trying to become this thing that was so far from myself, and it was like even the idea of being working class even in the environment I was in - do I feel comfortable claiming that title? My privilege was that I was in this environment where I’m going to drama school, I’m writing a poem in front of a lake surrounded by geese. I don’t have to think about the fact that in the area I grew up in there’s several stabbings and shootings a week. And the young black men in my community have an incredibly difficult time just going to visit their grandma in a different borough, let alone walking to the high road because  of postcode nonsense. So I guess it allowed me to think, yeah, what I’d grown up around and just being in this bubble. But when I left drama school I went back into the world that I gladly forgot about. Once I graduated I was fortunate enough to get a job, before I’d left drama school, which was at the Donmar warehouse doing the all female Shakespeare’s -

GEORGIA: Of course yeah!

SHILOH: - the show was Henry V, my first professional gig. And it’s funny because like the head of my course at the time, he’s like the third year - I don’t even know what his title was - either way, I didn’t like him. You can keep that on record, I’d tell him to his face. Yeah, he wasn’t really a fan of mine and he’d compare me to black women who were in the industry doing musical theatre. Like, y’know ‘Shiloh, don’t you wanna be like this person? don’t you wanna be like that person?’. I’m like- No! I’m in third year now and I don’t need to be absorbed in the bubble that you’ve told me that I need to exist in. I’m Shiloh and as a creative, what I offer is different because I’m different, I can’t be a second rate version of anyone else, I can only be myself. And that’s when I fully got that understanding because it’s like within this industry you only exist if somebody else did a good job ticking the boxes that you tick.

CHERRELLE: I think I find that’s more so with black women.

SHILOH: Yeah definitely

CHERRELLE: Black actors

SHILOH: And the fact that myself, throughout my entire drama school experience, ever since I can remember, I’ve always been a plus size kid. Y’know one of those little chubby potbelly kids. Literally, my character in Emilia was me at that age. Which is hilarious.

GEORGIA: I was howling

(Laughter)

GEORGIA: Made me laugh so much

CHERRELLE: It’s the shoes!

SHILOH: (Laughing) Literally! So animated. Y’know, that was me at that age! So me as an adult now, the only thing that I’ve learnt to do is internalise more. Because, y’know, I’m ‘too big for spaces’ and I ‘intimated’ without even speaking. It was always about making myself smaller. And that did nothing for my self esteem and my image y’know, just how I saw myself. And looking in the industry and being like, well actually, everyone’s talking about careers but they’re like ‘Shiloh once you graduated, you’re black, you’re gonna be fine, y’know, like don’t worry about it’. Hearing that a lot -

Laura: What?!

SHILOH: Oh my god

CHERRELLE: Oh yeah yeah yeah

SHILOH: It’s so funny

CHERRELLE: ‘You got that job cos you’re black’

SHILOH: ‘You got into Rose Bruford because you’re black’. (Laughs) Which was funny because I was like ‘erm noooo, you can’t do what I can do.’ I just had to be that level of blunt -

GEORGIA: Yeah, you should be

SHILOH: - because like it - I stopped caring about whether people liked me and it became about what am I getting from this place. I’m putting myself in debt to be here so I’m gonna do a lot better than I did in high school. I bunked a lot in high school. I’m surprised I got GCSE’s to be fair! But at the last minute I turned it around to be like ‘Shiloh, you’ve been here for how many years? Let’s leave with some decent grades so we can move forward with life’. But yeah, I wasn’t playing at drama school, I didn’t care whether people liked me or not. I was there to learn what I can. It’s not about me being the best student, it’s about me taking what I can from the place and try and use it in my adult life. And the fact was I’d never been out of studying. I didn’t take any gap years. So I literally went from primary school, to high school, to college, to drama school and this is the first in my life of being an adult (with air quotes). So I was fortunate enough to get a job before I left so I was like, I’m in the money!

CHERRELLE: I made it!

SHILOH: I made it! I’m at the Donmar where they don’t pay you loads of money, where everyone’s on the same wage. We’re getting money and the job finished in December and by January I was broke.

(Laughter)

SHILOH: WHAT DO I DO NOW?! Where can I get another income from?! And that was the first time in my life I had to have that conversation with myself of how to I sustain my creativity whilst also having an income. I’ve done some really cool gigs and I’ve been in majority shows that are all female. If somebody looked at my CV they’d think that I only do all female shows. Which is cool, y’know! It’s been great working with loads of women - apart from when you all sync up. Hormones everywhere.

GEORGIA: Hell breaks lose for 4/5 days

SHILOH: Oh gosh. EMOTIONS! I’m one of those people’s who struggles primarily with feelings. Like, what’s that Lego movie? Batman? He’s like ‘Ugh, feelings, 10 press ups. Ugh, ugh, ugh’ - that’s me. So being in casts with all female, it’s been interesting. Because the energy is very different, I’ve found. But they’ve all been very different experiences because as individuals what we all bring to the table is different, y’know. Personalities, Directors have all been different. I’ve been involved in the all female Shakespeares at the Donmar for the first three years of my acting career. I did bits in between, some acting gigs in between. It’s when I first started getting in gig theatre - air quotes - cos I don’t know how I feel about that title. In my mind, it’s just theatre.

GEORGIA: What’s gig theatre?

SHILOH: People like- they’d say Misty is gig theatre. Where you - It’s a mesh up between your stereotypical gig type approach to music and it’s definitely not musical theatre and just combining that with theatre. That wasn’t the most articulate.

GEORGIA: So it’s just theatre

CHERRELLE: It’s just theatre! But it’s so funny cos I was thinking of Amen Corner, then you can call that gig theatre but it’s just they’re jazz musicians. But it’s only -

SHILOH: I feel like it’s the genre that makes it -

CHERRELLE: That’s what I’m saying, it’s like, because it’s like contemporary style of music, that’s why they call it gig theatre. So it’s this whole thing of what low art and high art is. Which that conversation comes up a lot. Why can’t it just be theatre?

SHILOH: Why can’t it just be theatre?

CHERRELLE: Depending on who’s performing it -

SHILOH: It’s like the title of black theatre. ‘It’s a black play’. Well what makes it a black play? Is it cos the writer’s black? Or primarily the cast are black?

CHERRELLE: It’s in a white institution and directed by a white man, but all the cast are black. So it’s a black play.

SHILOH: Is that a black play? Or y’know, do you watch a show that is primarily white performers and say ‘oh that was a great white play’? Because no ones ever done that!

CHERRELLE: I think of Steve McQueens film, Shame, he’s a black director. Is that a black film?

SHILOH: Or is it a white film!?

CHERRELLE: Or is it white film?

SHILOH: Or is it just a film?!

CHERRELLE: Or the film that he - y’know, 12 years a slave - that’s a black film. Or, like, you think of Steve McQueen and he did the film - what’s it called? Set in Ireland?

Laura: Hunger?

CHERRELLE: Hunger. He’s written- he’s telling that historical with all white men, all Irish white men

SHILOH: Is that a black play? Cos it was done by a black... (laughs)

CHERRELLE: Is that a black film cos that was directed by a black director? That is an Irish film, I’d say it’s an Irish film.

SHILOH: And that’s the thing, we use these labels when it differs from what people perceive to be the norm. Y’know, ‘the norm’ is a white play.