Boss Womxn Series: Tabby Lamb
By: Amanda Carungi
Tabby (she/they) and I first met eight years ago. She was part of a British Invasion vacation to Los Angeles that included our mutual friend whom I met in London while attending drama school. Since our first meeting, Tabby has gone on to become a prolific writer, performer, and LGBTQ activist within the London theatre scene with work based around the intersections of pop culture and politics.
I sat down for an incredibly socially distant chat with Tabby in our respective homes (mine: LA, hers: London) to chat about her one-woman show, how her activism and art coexist, and her advice on living creatively in times of great uncertainty.
You live your life passionately and proudly outside the binary and use your voice to raise awareness and spark action both inside and outside the LGBTQ Community. How does that shape your career and ambitions? How does your activism inspire your art or vise versa?
I would say one of the things I am to do with all of my work is create work for queer audiences. A lot of people create work about queer people or incorporating queer people, but they still streamline it to a straight audience. With my work, I want to speak directly to queer people and about queer people and I want it to speak authentically. I want to show the lives that we live and that in itself can be educational and entertaining to cis people. I want to show the trans nurses and the trans teachers and bus drivers and all those people who are out there living lives without having to do a backflip.
I made a promise to myself at the beginning of the year, before the pandemic, that all of my work would focus on queer and trans joy. I feel like there’s so much negativity, especially over here, around trans people and specifically trans women that the outlook is bleak at the moment.
So for me to focus on queer joy is radical. To show that we can be happy and we can be in steady relationships if we choose to be or we can be single and be surrounded by our best friends. I try to focus on that more - I used to get a lot of sympathy and attention on Twitter for sharing when I was verbally attacked or chased down the street. I still share those moments, but I try to share my moments of joy and solidarity and love.
You wrote and starred in your one woman show Since U Been Gone and took it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year. What was the process like getting that off the ground?
The process took a while. When I first started writing it, I wasn’t writing it to be a show. It was essentially a love letter to two of my best friends who died and it was updating them on where I was in my life. Both of them died before I come out as trans, before I changed my pronouns, and before I started to understand who I really was as an adult. The first line of the show is ‘it’s 4:10AM on New Year’s Day,’ because I started writing it then. It was the first year without my best friend, Jordan. It was the first time I realized, ‘this is the first year she won’t see, she’s not going to get any older, I’m changing, all of these things are happening in my life and she has no idea. I started writing it for myself.
But then I was accepted into the SoHo Theater’s Writer’s lab and I had to write a play. I didn’t have anything so I said, ‘fuck it, I’ll use these letters.’ I didn’t finish the play by the end of the lab, but I got a lot of support and help. After that I was invited to join the LGBTQ Arts Review: Raising Our Voices Scheme, which is dedicated to supporting underrepresented trans, non-binary, lesbian, bisexual, and intersectional LBTQ voices.
There was nothing left to do but to start developing the show. I got producers and a team around me, and brought a musician onboard who is another non binary trans femme person, Nicol Parkinson, who helped me create these incredible soundscapes for the show. I wanted everything to sound like memories of songs instead of the actual record. Nicol went above and beyond and was able to give me the ‘An Adele song playing over the loudspeaker in a Starbucks five years ago with a twinge of nostalgia and longing’ I was going for.
The show was picked up and produced by a large theatre festival here in the UK, so we toured at the High Tide Festival, Camden People’s Theatre, Volt Festival, and this year we were meant to be doing a European tour, but COVID happened.
So we put the show online for about a month and it raised £500 for the Outside Project, a charity for homeless queer people in the UK. The script was published this year and I sold posters from the various theatre runs to raise money for Exist Loudly - an organization for queer Black youth because obviously at the time lockdown happening, Black Lives Matter was going on as well and I wanted to make sure I was supporting that in some way and raising money and supporting Black people especially queer Black trans people who are some of the most marginalized people in the world.
I know it’s been really hard for artists everywhere at the moment, but you’re continuing to raise money and awareness for those in the LGBTQ Community…
It’s really important for me to say that yes, while I’m in a shit situation at the moment, I’m also super privileged. I own my own flat and that is a massive thing that meant that when everyone else was struggling to make their rent, I was given a mortgage break. I wanted to make sure that yes, I can buy food, but could also help others who needed it more. I was quite lucky as well that one of the projects that got cancelled at the start of lockdown still provided my writer’s fee. And whilst the government directly haven’t been great over here supporting artists, I’ve managed to get an emergency grant from the Arts Council and I found out this week I’ll be receiving a grant from Netflix. I’ve been lucky with my writing work, and I’ve still been gigging!
Can you tell us more about that?
It’s all been online, but I’ve been doing a lot of poetry. Which is wild, because before the pandemic, I didn’t really perform my poetry. I didn’t know any poetry nights, didn’t know anyone in that world, and when lockdown started virtual events started popping up on Instagram Live and Zoom, so I’ve managed to do quite a few readings. It’s been an interesting time creatively, but things have been happening, which is lucky.
What advice do you have for up and coming performers and writers?
I think there are a few things that are very specific to right now. We’re in this weird and wild pandemic world where everyone has pretty much the same access to an audience. Everyone can have a social media account and put their work on it. Whether it's text on a color background on Insta or filming yourself talking, or maybe a Twitter or TikTok account, we are all able to do those things and to get our creativity out there.
But also the world is falling apart right now. Work isn’t necessarily the most important thing, survival is. And if you can’t work or create right now, that’s okay and let yourself relax and give yourself some self care, look after yourself, and having a great team around you.
Make sure you have a solid support system around you and have people around you who know fuck all about whatever you’re creating that you can just completely zone out with. My partner and my best friends don’t work in theatre. We don’t talk about theatre, we talk about the latest episode of Fleabag or Britney Spears’s latest Instagram post. Having a bit of disconnect and separation from the work is very healthy, I think.
Any projects you’ve been working on while the world is on hold?
I’m currently working on a staged trans rom-com. We’ve just recorded a short version for an audio play that will come out in January, but I’m working on the full length at the moment. There are no representations of trans-for-trans romances in mainstream popular culture - I really want to change that. As a trans person in a relationship with another trans person I want to show that happiness we can find with each other.
I’m also working on a project with a dance company where we’ll create a dance show with a lot of gender diverse youth and elderly people. We’re trying to figure out how to stage it in a post-COVID world.
I’ve got a few other projects I’m waiting to hear on in regards to funding. But I’m also working on a traditional play about a 73 year old trans woman named Bernadette Peters and a spec script for television.
I’m trying to get to television next since theatre is dead for a bit. Hopefully it will come back, but who knows when that will be able to happen. So TV and film is where the money is at the moment, and I would quite like some of that!