Lucy McCormick: ‘I’ve had absolutely s***loads of therapy – everyone should’

Lucy McCormick’s stage shows involve naked crowd-surfing and pulling things out of various orifices. So when the Edinburgh Fringe sensation was cast as one of the greatest heroines in literature, Cathy, in a new stage version of Wuthering Heights, people had questions.

“Quite a few people kept saying to me: ‘Oh, are you going to sing that song? The Kate Bush song?’” laughs McCormick, whose risqué, in-your-face hit solo shows often involve bursting into song. “I was like, ‘Um, no. That would be really cringe. This is a legitimate acting job.’”

The casting makes sense. In her live shows, the actor and performance artist is feral, brazen and provocative – quite unlike her gentler and more vulnerable real self, as she natters away like a long-lost friend from her flat in London’s Woolwich. Her genre-defying first solo show, 2016’s Edinburgh Fringe hit Triple Threat, was a sexed-up retelling of the New Testament. She played all the characters, including Jesus, recreating the patriarchal history of religion through a female viewpoint.

In the subversive pop concert Life: Live! – Battersea Arts Centre’s first post-lockdown show in July – she was Lucy Muck, a narcissistic wannabe pop star pulling off a Britney Spears-style stadium show on a shoestring budget. In Post Popular, another sell-out Fringe show in 2019 and a Soho Theatre hit the following year, she played X-rated versions of historical women, performing Anne Boleyn’s beheading by squirting ketchup on her neck and singing “The First Cut is the Deepest”.

“Sometimes people call my work ‘bonkers’,” says McCormick, who had a small role as a waitress in 2019’s Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, and played a topless protest singer in BBC One’s This Time With Alan Partridge earlier this year. “Well to me, the shows make much more sense than real life. All of that is confusing and weird. And this is like me trying to make sense of it.” The shows have become a space in which she can “be in charge, [and] actually be quite good at it”. “Which is a very different space and different feeling to what I have felt in life a lot. I felt like I just had a lot of anxiety. I just struggled to fit into life as it’s been dictated to me.”

It’s why she relates to Emily Bronte’s tragic heroine. “What Cathy is going through is essentially a nervous breakdown,” she explains. “I’ve always been drawn to tragic characters. In my shows, I’m trying to figure out the tragedy of life, and doing that through comedy.”

Emma Rice’s production opens at Bristol Old Vic later this month before touring to the National Theatre. McCormick describes it as “brilliantly camp and theatrical… drama with a big ‘D’”. It has a big crossover, she adds, with her own work – “balancing the tragic and the comic and finding a certain kind of irreverence”.

She’s trying not to overthink the famous role – and instead, to bring herself to it. “The character is a lesson really in sort of repressed emotion,” she explains, “and lying to yourself, and having too much pride.” Cathy betrays herself and Heathcliff by marrying Edgar Linton – despite knowing Heathcliff is her “soulmate”, as McCormick puts it. “It’s also true, of course, that she is trapped in a patriarchal system. And she feels that she doesn’t really have that many choices. But it was interesting to me that she doesn’t repent for a lot of really awful behaviour.”

McCormick, who says she could give me “100 different examples of how I’ve sort of struggled with life and with mental health”, can relate to Cathy’s breakdown. One incident in particular stands out: the actor had a “very weird” and “physical reaction” to her father dying of terminal cancer in 2014.

“I became a bit obsessed with my own health,” she says, sounding bemused by her own behaviour, “and I started obsessively going to hospital. I would pretty much pack a bag because I thought when I got there, they would be like, ‘Oh my God, get her into the emergency room now.’ And it was the least helpful way of going through somebody else’s terminal illness. It was the most self-centred, egotistical way of dealing with that crisis.”

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On her “tour of hospitals” – where she demanded that they give her “internal scans” – everybody kept saying nothing was wrong with her. “Until one doctor acknowledged this might be more of a psychological issue than a physical one.”

She refers to it as “catastrophising” – imagining the worst possible scenario she could think of, “which was to have to say to my parents, who are going through that: ‘Oh, by the way, I’m dying as well.’”

Has she had therapy? “Yeah, I’ve had absolutely s***loads of therapy. Not that it means anything. I think everyone should have therapy, really.”

McCormick started making darkly comic and boundary-pushing shows when she was at university, studying drama at the University of Essex’s East 15 acting school. She was a member of the performance art group Getinthebackofthevan, much of whose 2015 Soho Theatre show Number 1, The Plaza she spent smeared in fake excrement – as a metaphor for dealing with s***. A few years before Triple Threat, she had been performing around nightclubs, queer clubs and within the performance-art community. She got the role of Cathy after Rice saw her playing Lucy Muck in the cabaret theatre show Effigies of Wickedness at the Gate Theatre in 2018 and invited her to a five-day workshop at the National Theatre Studio.

But such was McCormick’s insecurity that she was shocked when it dawned on her that she was the only one in line to nab the lead role. “I’d heard that Emma was quite avant-garde sometimes, so I genuinely thought there must be five Cathys or something,” she chuckles. “But that’s also something that’s very cool about Emma. If she likes someone, and she thinks they’ve got something to bring, she seems to just really go with her instincts and trust them as a performer.”

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Rice was controversially sacked from Shakespeare’s Globe in 2018 for being too unconventional with the Bard’s plays, and launched her own company, Wise Children, that same year; her critically acclaimed stage production of the film Bagdad Café was a triumph at the Bristol Old Vic this summer. Wuthering Heights is Rice’s fifth production: it’s an all-singing, all-dancing show, but “very much inspired by the period”, says McCormick, with an ensemble playing the Yorkshire moors “like a Greek chorus”.

It’s only to be expected that McCormick has an off-beat moment when she breaks into a rock song, “Look Up”. It happens around the time of Cathy’s famous speech: “I am Heathcliff! Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

“She’s grappling with the decision she’s made [to marry Linton],” says McCormick. “It feels like this exorcism. And then it goes back into the story and back into the kind of more quiet music.”

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McCormick spent lockdown asking herself, “Gosh, do I have a career left?” and “Is there going to be anything to go back to?” It’s still a concern to her how this is all going to play out. “Nobody really knows. The job that we do involves having a big group of people in a room together, often in very close quarters. And that is just a fact.”

But it’s forced the actor to branch out. She’s currently in the middle of some television writing – “trying to figure out how to translate my shows into TV”. Who knows? Lucy Muck might become a star after all.

‘Wuthering Heights’ opens at the Bristol Old Vic on 20 October, with previews from 11 October. It tours to York Theatre Royal, 9 to 20 November, and runs at the National Theatre in February and March 2022, before a UK tour