Making Madonna/Whore #1: My first show

Welcome to the Selena Mersey blog!

This blog post marks not only the first proper publication on my brand spanking new website (hell yes), but the first in a series. A series, you say? Yes, I respond, in written blog post format. Let me explain:

As you’ll likely know if you’re visiting my blog, I’m a musical comedian, burlesque artist, and theatremaker. I’m also passionate about demystifying the process of creating live performance.

Through my adventures in learning how to cobble together my first solo stage show, I’ve picked up some valuable wisdom. Only in year 3 of what I’d consider my professional career, I’m still orienting myself as an “emerging artist” and gleaning information about not just the best moves to make, but the ones to avoid making again. The series I’m starting with this entry is going to take you through each step of the journey that led me to the creation and refinement of my debut show, Madonna/Whore.

Since the inception of Madonna/Whore in early 2022, the show has gone on to sell out runs, win awards, and is shortly going to make its debut at Edinburgh Fringe. I’m delighted with this unprecedented success and want to share my experience with anyone who might benefit from reading about it - especially fledgling artists looking for some transparency. As an additional benefit, I’d also love to use this series to document my development as a personal record and a testament to the beauty of PROGRESS. We all start somewhere, and I’d like to tell you exactly where Madonna/Whore - and Selena Mersey - started. Come with me on a journey…

Cue dreamy flashback music…

I was lucky to get to know the now-pursuing-solo-projects comedy group Privates, AKA Christian Brighty, Luke Rollason, and Tom Penn, through the Brighton Fringe scene back when I worked in the Box Office. They were always lovely lads - so lovely, in fact, that I moved in with them in 2021. We lived with about 30-40 other people in a London guardianship which had formerly operated as a care home. It was pretty much like living in student halls, except with adults who actually did the dishes and the occasional handrail on the wall (which I didn’t mind at all, especially when coming home after a heavy night out).

Sadly, I barely have any photos from my time living in the care home. This is one of the few I could find: Luke and our housemate Fred, making a Big Birthday Breakfast on my Big 25th Birthday.

Having worked in the Box Office for 4 years at that point, I had come to be very familiar with the Brighton Fringe scene. Initially, having moved down to Brighton for university, I had never even heard of the festival. In my first year there, I started working for the Box Office and quickly fell in head-over-heels love with the world of cabaret and alternative comedy. By the time I had become friends and moved in with the Privates (whom I was still a tiny bit starstruck by at this point), I had wanted to develop my own show for a little while but was overwhelmed at the notion. At this point, Fringe performers were still aspirational superstars to me. Imagine having your own show! Constructing an hour’s worth of stagecraft! Taking up space and having something to say (or not)!

I was desperate to build something of my own, but the registration deadlines always seemed to come around so quickly and I never had anything near ready. When I shared this lamentation with Luke, he gave me the most important advice I could have heard at that time: no one actually has their show completely written when they register for fringe festivals. You register with your best guess of an event description - keep it vague if you’re not sure what it’s going to end up being - and then you use the deadlines to motivate yourself to actually write the show. Hearing this was like a switch had flipped in my mind. I’m not just completely hopeless; everyone is winging it! (Good life advice too.) This is a great example of a strangely reassuring experience I’ve had multiple times since then, and I’m sure I will continue to have many times throughout my life: once you peer behind the curtain, you see that it’s not just you, most performers are bricking it behind-the-scenes but dragging themselves on stage anyway.

The first page of a notebook, proclaiming the start of my Madonna/Whore journey alongside a music project which got put on the backburner for… well, around 3 years now.

An excellent example of the awkward deer-in-headlights persona I tried to cultivate for a short amount of time.

(Side note: my biggest inspiration, Tim Minchin, used to do something similar! I wouldn’t be surprised if he did it for the exact same reasons.)

The guys pretty much held my hand throughout the process of getting started. I was a confident musical comedian and wanted to put an hour-long musical comedy show together, but you can’t just jump from song to song with nothing in between. Well, not as a comedian. Musicians often do this and I hear it’s called a concert. I came to the conclusion that I had to try writing stand-up for the first time. Once again, I was terrified. (This is a theme that will recur throughout this series.) By this point, I had gotten to feel comfortable being funny in the format of a song, but that’s because music has clear structure and format - I’ve always seen writing a song as a sort of template to be filled in. The idea of supporting my music with actual talking freaked me out. It felt like a vast void of possibility; a bottomless pit of which I had no comprehension. Beyond introducing myself and awkwardly moving from one song to the next, I’d never spoken directly to an audience as myself for a substantial amount of time! And even then, what I had done before had consisted of me capitalising in a very self-conscious way on how uncomfortable I felt, staring blankly with wide eyes and creating a sort of weird palpable tension that audiences found very gently, politely amusing.

Christian offered, incredibly kindly, to be my director/mentor while I got the first version of the show together. He could clearly sense that I was a nervous wreck, which was very astute of him, because I kept crying in our living room. (I was indeed anxious about starting to make my first ever solo show but also going through a lot of other big life stuff.) In his role, he essentially acted as an accountability buddy - and, I suggested, a name to stick on my flyer as a marketing tactic, although he assured me at the time that absolutely no one cared who he was and it wouldn’t do anything to sell my show but he’s flattered nonetheless. Since then he has gone on to become lauded as Lord Brighty, the Regency-era playboy with a brand new BBC Radio 4 show coming soon. Maybe I should put his name on my poster again…

Sat in the café of the National Theatre on London’s South Bank, we drew up a calendar of the next couple of months, ranging from the week commencing 31st January to the week ending 3rd April. Christian had the idea that I could choose a topic for each week in the calendar and write 5 minutes of stand-up for each one. With 9 weeks in our schedule and allowing for 1 week off, I’d ideally end up with 40 minutes of material which could be shaved down or rewritten as necessary and paired with my songs, which I found much less intimidating to write. Easy, that’s a 50-60-minute show right there! Each week I would send him my 5 minutes of material in the form of a Google Doc - even better if I could include a video of me trying that material out at an open mic night. I don’t actually think he ever opened most of the documents, but it doesn’t really matter. The schedule itself and the idea that I had someone waiting for me to submit my homework was enough to motivate me each week. Fun fact: in the years since, both Christian and I have been diagnosed as having ADHD, which in hindsight makes a lot of stuff make sense.

The actual schedule Christian drew up in his notebook for me, under the working title of the show, “Freudian Slip”. He sent me this photo afterwards and I copied all of it into a Google sheet and colour-coded everything, because I’m me.

Bonus fact: I started making this show, then decided to adopt a stage name part-way through the process, hence the title of this notebook page semi-doxxing me.

I was aiming for my show to be performed at Brighton Fringe, which takes place during the month of May. So after the final week of my newly-devised content-generation schedule, I would have another month to pick out the best material and arrange it into a draft that made some kind of sense. After drawing up our plan in the café, we then brainstormed a bunch of different sub-topics that existed under the umbrella of my main theme, which was the Madonna/Whore complex and the strong emotional reaction it evoked from me. (Clearly that theme stuck.)

Looking back now, having redrafted and refined the material, I can see that many of these sub-topics were scattered across the more general theme of “frustration around existing as a woman”. My notes covered a huge range of subjects, from sexual liberation to being scared to walk alone in the evening. I remember delving so deep in that café that I started crying, which Christian was probably used to by this point. It took some time - mostly the year after the first “work in progress” performances of Madonna/Whore - to whittle the plethora of topics down to something cohesive and digestible for an audience. I had started out by brain-splurging all over the place and then had to reel myself back in. I now know that a lot of the issues I initially talked about with Christian and wrote down are rich enough to be shows of their own, and some of them have been carefully squared away to return to later and develop in their own right.

Christian’s second page of notes, sparsely documenting some of the things we talked about, and which probably won’t make a whole lot of sense to people who weren’t there (i.e. everyone who’s ever existed, except for us).

This chat produced the structure that allowed me to dive into the writing process with less fear. A cup of tea, a slice of cake, a hand-drawn schedule, and a friendly face saying “I have faith in you!”. Turns out that the fear of letting someone you admire down is a powerful motivator. I’ve since recognised how well I respond to accountability as a requirement and regularly try to implement it as a productivity tool. (Apologies to all the people I’ve roped into this.) This probably turned out to be the most significant moment in my chrysalis as a theatremaker, along with sweet Lukey Rollason telling me enthusiastically about how everyone, behind the glossy veneer of show posters and frenzied marketing and suspiciously vague yet enticing blurbs, was just as unprepared as me. It’s something that keeps proving itself in myriad ways as time goes on. None of us know what we’re fucking doing until we just take the plunge. Now stop crying, finish your cake, and write something.

In the next post, I’ll tell you about that period of time between drawing up the schedule with Christian and performing my first ever solo show at Brighton Fringe 2022. I dedicated those few months of my life to the craft, which involved repeatedly forcing myself on stage to do excruciatingly reluctant stand-up, diving headfirst into the sparkly world of burlesque, and lots and lots of learning.

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Ciao for now x