Cathy Bray / The Tangent Queen

About Cathy Bray — Reviewer at Sydney Dramaturgical

Cathy Bray finds herself older but no wiser, still laughing at her own jokes and more CHILDISH with the passing years.

She's a charcutière for resentments (butchered and smoked). Rarely cured.

Many past their use-by dates. She believes one shouldn't hold a grudge…for more than 50 years.

Origins

Cathy got the way she is, by growing up with 5 older brothers (aged between 16 and 3 when she was born) and surviving the death of her mother when she was 6 months old.

This led to her lifelong obsession about NOT separating mothers and babies via adoption, orphanages and especially NOT by Australia's shocking separation of Aboriginal children from their mothers resulting in the inter-generational trauma of the STOLEN GENERATIONS.

At 5 and a half she gained a very good step-mother when her dad remarried and she was flowergirl at their wedding (see her 2012 Sydney Fringe show INAPPROPRIATE where her hatred of weddings is documented in a scene called HELL'S BELLS).

At the age of 9 she was sent to boarding school at St. Trinian's (name withheld) where she learned how to misbehave from the other girls and got a sense of humour and healthy scepticism around male authority.

She now feels thoroughly vindicated by Sir Salman Rushdie who says we must have #FearlessDisrespect for those in authority.

London Years

In 1997, Cathy was hit on the arse with a rainbow when her husband got a job in London and they moved with their 3 kids to live in Highgate for 3 years and go to Europe a lot.

She had an excuse to take Australian visitors to every show she could lay her hands on.

Just before they left at the end of 2000, she saw Vanessa Redgrave playing Prospero in The Tempest at The Globe and Michael Gambon playing John Shank in Cressida at The Almeida.

Sydney Career

Cathy worked at Wesley College at Sydney Uni from 2003–2008 setting up their Development Office to raise money for scholarships.

From 2009–2010 she worked at the Poets Union before their forced merger with Melbourne which provided rich pickings for her 2011 show POET TREE on artistic ambivalence at The Seymour Centre.

Her first show in 2010 was MAD WOMAN'S BREAKFAST. EAT MY BUSH! built around Australian ambivalence towards America and specifically George Bush's 2007 visit to the APEC conference in Sydney and the hilarity of The Chaser's Osama Bin Laden stunt at the cavalcade leading up to the event.

The Duchess of Over-Disclosure

In 2014 The Duchess of Over-Disclosure took plenty of latitude, buggered the compass on good taste, and confirmed the ridiculous as highly regional in LATITUDE PLATITUDE with free-ranging preambles, gratuitous comedy and some serious poetry.

She was stunned to win the 2014 Sydney Fringe Poetry, Literature and Spoken Word award!