The Interview: Reuben Kaye on the cost and the nourishment of being an artist in Australia

In a theatre dressing room, Reuben Kaye is fumbling with his phone, trying to prop it up against something so we can talk face-to-face, his image shifting rapidly between vertical and horizontal.

At one point, he disappears entirely — his phone died — only to re-emerge and begin the process again.

This Kaye, the new artistic director of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, is relaxed, pared back. Not the one in fake eyelashes, stiletto-heeled boots and arseless chaps who struts onto the stage to kick off his live shows.

Chewing on gummy lollies, the off-duty comedian and cabaret artist is as warm and effervescent in conversation as he is on stage; an intoxicating force of personality who laughs uproariously, easily, often.

A decade on from his first Melbourne comedy festival show in 2016, Kaye has earned a dedicated following and critical praise (last month, he shared the top prize at Sydney Comedy Festival) but has sometimes spurred controversy.

A joke he made on The Project in 2023 about Jesus being nailed to the cross prompted an apology from the hosts and hundreds of submissions to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Subjected to death threats, Kaye was even forced to cancel a run of shows.

Three years later, Kaye is not cowed by what happened. He is as ribald and unflinching as ever.

What do you think is distinct about cabaret made by Australian artists today?

I think more than any other art form — and Australians lead the way in a lot of art forms overseas, we really do — cabaret is where we truly shine, because there is no other nation that has as its core value self-mocking, self-awareness, a self-hatred, almost.

And this luxury of distance, of separation from the world, of isolation, means that we look at art forms from other worlds and other nations, and when we parrot them, or when we inhabit them, we do so with a tilted, mocking, sardonic, sometimes absurdist lens, and that lends itself to cabaret so intently. I think Australians have a unique advantage. We've almost been doing cabaret through years of being maligned by the rest of the world.

Part of that is the larrikin spirit. Australia loves an oddball. You think about someone like Yahoo Serious — we love these weird people. We have at our core one of our national heroes, Ned Kelly, whose team wore dresses. We have Captain Moonlight, the gay bushranger. We've always had camp at the centre of our identity. Because we have had such a macho identity, the flip side of that has always been a man in a dress.

And we love to take cultural icons and turn them into musicals: Phar Lap, Schapelle Corby, Shane Warne …

I'm sorry, Schapelle Corby is just a concept that sings. What can you say?

So, why did you want to take on the top job at the cabaret festival?

Originally, I didn't want to. Well, I did, and then I saw what the job entailed and I pulled my hat out of the ring real quick. I saw what Virginia [Gay, who ran the cabaret festival last year] was doing, and saw how in everything Virginia was, and I thought, no, no, no, I can't do that.

But then at the end of Virginia's tenure, the festival approached me, and I thought, I have something I want to do with this festival that feels relevant, exciting, a new direction for the festival, while also still true to the festival's ideals.

Also, I don't have anything else to get from Adelaide after doing the Fringe and the cabaret festival for 10 years now. If anything, I have something to give back. So, this festival really feels like a love letter, a return on investment, for the 10 years Adelaide has been investing in me.

What's the new direction you wanted to go in?

All festivals, especially arts festivals, are trying to balance the existing audience while finding new audiences, getting younger people excited about the arts. I felt, given my audience, I'm uniquely positioned to juggle those two concepts, to be able to provide programming that intrigues and excites the existing audience, who are super worldly, who know what they like, who have seen everything, while at the same time bringing in new audience members, making the festival more accessible.

Because I think some people perhaps have the view of the cabaret festival as, "oooh, a classy lady sings ballads, entertainment for people who have a beach house who are going to be adversely affected by the budget".

For me, cabaret is a punk art form; it's inherently groundbreaking, rule-breaking, multidisciplinary, queer, tilted. It's an art form of the people, because it doesn't obey, or it has its middle finger up at all of the establishment, and I knew the artists I wanted to program who served all of that.

Cabaret is a political art form, first and foremost, before it's indulgent, camp, queer. For me, it is a stridently political art form. It's the only art form that really rises and flourishes in these times of huge social upheaval.

Would your teenage self be impressed that you ended up here now or think it's uncool?

I think my teenage self would think this is super cool, because I still view myself as 17 years old and think what I get to do is outrageous and very cool. Whenever I look in the mirror and see my face, what I see is my 17-year-old face, and then people are talking to me like I'm an adult and I feel like three kids in a trench coat.

When I was growing up in the 90s and early 00s, knowing I was queer, I didn't even think I would make it to 40. You know, when you're a kid, you think, oh my God, 40 is so old. And now I'm 40 — admittedly, my knees do sound like someone's popping candy in their mouth every time I stand up.

And as a queer person, I didn't think I would live because I didn't see any old gay people growing up.

It's such a tragic thing that so much of a generation of the queer community was lost to the AIDS crisis.

We lost a generation of fathers, brothers, uncles, we lost a whole strata that would have shown a whole generation there's a future, and I am a child of that lost, younger generation who didn't have those — I don't like using the term elder, but, like, what other term is there? — elders of our culture.

How does it feel to be becoming a kind of "elder" to the next generation of queer people?

How dare you [laughs].

I promise I'm not trying to call you old!

It's so interesting. I used to rebel against it, I think, out of vanity and partly as a joke, but now I see the generation below me, and I'm filled with so much pride and surprise and joy and warmth at what they achieve because of what I've achieved, because of what my generation and the generation before that and the generation before that and the generation before that achieved.

And if anything, I see it as even more impressive given how much we lost in the 80s and 90s and in the 2000s. It means so much more.

Do you have advice that you give to people who want to become an artist today, like you? And speaking of advice, what do you tell the drunk girl crying in the bathroom?

Nothing is worth this. You should not be crying near an unflushed toilet, ruining your make-up. Do you know how expensive make-up is these days? That's a $60 mascara, and you might be paying 80 bucks for a foundation now. Think about just financially: Is this worth it?

What I say when anyone says they want to be an artist: My parents didn't want me to be an artist, because it just didn't seem like it was a possible career. They are artists themselves [his mother is a filmmaker and his father a painter and sculptor], they know how hard it is and what they wanted was to protect me, so Mum very jokingly said, "Look, be a plumber, an accountant, or a funeral director, someone who won't run out of clients".

When it became certain that I was going to be an artist, my parents went, "You better be a good one, because there's too many shit ones hanging around". And that's what I would say to younger people now who say, "I want to be an artist".

Be one, but you better be a good one. You better work your butt off and be passionate about it and learn from everyone else, learn, learn, learn, soak it all up.

What's the cost of working that hard?

The cost of doing it right — I don't even know if doing it right is the phrase — the cost of doing it the way I've done it is that it can be lonely. I'm just very lucky that I like my own company and I have magnificent friends, because it's a lot for a romantic partner to deal with: the instability of it, the emotional ups and downs, the intensity of the work, and how much time and devotion it takes.

It feels like being an artist who gives so much of themselves can also build community, if that makes sense.

Building community through these shows is the reward you get — that's the food, the nourishment, because doing it costs.

I know this seems like a toxic thing to say, but it's really meant as a positive: Good art has to take something from you. To make something worthwhile has to cost something. And how you balance that cost is the joy of knowing that what you have lost has been given to someone else. You see that in the audience, you see that in the effect it has on people, the visibility. That's the beautiful part; that's the holy grail, I think.

I don't mean that all art has to torture the artist. But art has to mean something. You have to say something that you believe in, and it has to, in some way, involve a sense of risk of saying the thing, whatever that thing is in that moment, from that artist to that audience.

Is there anything that's too risky to say on stage? That comedians and artists shouldn't speak about?

No, I think the right person can talk about the right thing, the right way, at the right time. Anything's up for grabs — it's just how you do it. The minute you say you can't talk about things, then you give them too much power. You have to be able to discuss things and joke about everything. It just depends exactly how you do it, and from which viewpoint, and with how much sensitivity and brains you do it.

Is there anything that makes you laugh, no matter how much you resist it, even if it's silly or strange or embarrassing?

Dogs waking up from dreams and running into walls — that will never be old to me. Cats jumping off things and misjudging distances. That's worth everything. That's comedy gold for me. They're such wonderful metaphors for the human condition and my state of mind generally.

What are the challenges facing cabaret artists today? Is AI coming for cabaret? Are there spaces for emerging artists to hone their craft?

I actually think AI doesn't necessarily threaten cabaret as such, but it threatens the entire artistic community, and when the entire artistic community gets threatened, all of us are threatened. Cabaret operates at the fringes of the mainstream because it adapts and uses the mainstream art forms, so if all the art forms drop off, then cabaret is going to be one of the first that gets affected.

But do I think incorporating tech into cabaret is the way forward? Yes. There will always be lounge cabaret, there will always be a three-piece band, high hat, drums, musical theatre, jazz style cabaret. But the cabaret artists I'm interested in are the ones that exist in and comment on the modern world, and they're doing that through using AV, their phones, tech, in new and interesting ways to comment on what's happening now.

Are there avenues for new cabaret artists? Yes, fewer, absolutely, because venues have closed around the world. That being said, festivals like the Adelaide Fringe, the Melbourne [International] Comedy Festival, Sydney Fringe, Melbourne Fringe, Melt Festival, the cabaret festival here in Adelaide, the Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival, all these festivals are increasing their scope, and they're growing because there is a human appetite for all of this.

And more and more places are widening their scope of what they will give money for, for funding. So, cabaret, you couldn't get funding for — you had to reframe it as performance art, as something highfalutin, but now they're giving money for cabaret.

There are avenues for cabaret artists all the time. It just takes work and belief that people inherently trust cabaret as an art form now more than they did before.

The Kaye Hole is at Adelaide Festival Centre as part of Adelaide Cabaret Festival on June 20.

Adelaide Cabaret Festival runs until June 21.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.