Penny Ashton’s curriculum vitae reads: “Poet, MC, Comedienne, Actor, Social Commentator, TV Presenter, Voice Over Artist, Improviser, Wedding Celebrant, Podcaster and all-round show-off.” She has neglected to add: “World-class talker.” She could talk the hind legs off a dozen donkeys and one person – that person being me.
It is, obviously, ridiculous to complain about somebody you are attempting to interview. You want people you are attempting to interview to talk. I say attempting to interview because I early on gave up on any idea of actually interviewing her. She said almost an hour later, that she reckoned I’d got about five questions in. That is overly generous.
She is her own publicist so I said she could sell the new season of her play The Tempestuous: A Shrew’d New Comedy by Will Shakespeare and Penny Ashton. Of course, she got waylaid and went off on a labyrinthine tour of her brain – it must be insane inside there – so I suppose I’ll have to do it for her. There is a “stroppy spinster”, Princess Rosa. There are 11 characters, all played by her. There are “popping codpieces” and belching stepfathers and plenty of Shakespeare for the bard’s fans and plenty of “dick jokes” for everyone else. The media release will likely be the only one ever in the history of media releases to include the words “puffed bull’s pizzles”. The Tempestuous is at Tapac, The Auckland Performing Arts Centre, from October 30 to November 2 before dates in Wellington and Dunedin. That’ll do her.
A little bit saucy
She lives in Glendene, West Auckland, with her husband Matthew Harvey in a house – their first – with pink and purple petunias in the garden and hot pink splashback tiles in the kitchen. He used to be a draughtsman and a performance poet and now works in a bike shop. “I’m a bit sad he doesn’t perform any more because he was a wonder. That’s how we met, at a poetry open mic, and I was, like, ‘he’s saucy’. He did his poem: I want to be like Tom Jones. One of the lines was: ‘and I move my hips in a circular motion’. But he’s not cut out for the hustle, which is strong, and that’s my whole life.”
They don’t have kids. “I haven’t made any children because, ooh ooh, don’t want to. Yet when you fundamentally break it down, the very process that actually populates the world is another thing that has been used to control women. And that is just mind-boggling.”
She is very happy that other people have “made little taxpayers to pay my pension”. She quite likes children when they get to about 6 or 7 and you can have some sort of conversation with them. “I babysat my niece and nephew once when they were 2 and 3 and I wanted to stab my face off with boredom after about half an hour.”
Her house is flamboyant but also cosy. She is flamboyant but also somehow, sometimes, cosy. She had spent the day before we (or she) spoke planting the petunias. She went out in the night and gleefully hunted petunia-munching slugs. “Don’t tell the Buddhists but I came out and squished a whole lot of slugs.” I will tell the Buddhists. “Well, I don’t believe in any religion, so I’m fine.” Even her gardening is performance art. She probably recited dirty ditties in perfect iambic pentameter as she went about her slug squishing.
She went to a Catholic primary school in Christchurch, where she grew up, and an Anglican secondary school. “So I feel very qualified in my atheism. I call myself a prolapsed Catholic.” That is the sort of groaner of a joke that she revels in. She is the queen of innuendo, which is a euphemism for really bloody rude.
The other item she left off her CV: world-class hustler. She learnt from another world-class hustler, her father, Kevin. “My father was a condom-vending machine salesman, an insurance salesman, a vacuum cleaner salesman, a gambling-cards salesman. So I have that self-employed person in my life, who hustled constantly and I’ve definitely got that.”
I’ve never spoken to anybody whose father was a condom-vending machine salesman. “I’m not surprised. He even put one into Antarctica once. My dad … and, well, this just sort of sums me up a little bit as well. My dad would sell two for $2 or, as he put it, ‘a buck a fuck’.”
She uses swear words as punctuation, and so do I. And once one potty-mouthed person starts swearing so does the other potty-mouthed person. It’s contagious. So just assume that almost every sentence contains some rude word and insert one as you so desire. And don’t if you don’t.
I can’t avoid this one. I managed to get in a question about her being a marriage celebrant. I might have put it more diplomatically but I thought, bugger it, since when does she do diplomacy? I asked how she managed to not be the centre of attention when she was marrying people. “You know what? Fuck you,” she said. I sounded like one of her mother’s priests. “For me it’s all about making sure people know the two people who are standing up and getting married. One of my best compliments after a wedding was, ‘It feels like you’ve known us all of our lives’.”
Honouring her mum
Her mother Judy was a presumably not- sweary nurse. “But she was one of the maternal homemakers who quit after she got pregnant with my sister. My mother is just one of the nicest people alive. So I don’t take after her to the same extent.”
Her mother is very involved with her church, and was president of the PTA and the athletics club when Ashton was at school. She’s had a long involvement with the Court Theatre.
She drove her young daughter to dance competitions and, when Ashton was about 5, took her to see Badjelly the Witch. “And I was, like, ‘Yep, that’s it. That’s what I’ll be doing. Thank you.’ Really.”
So we can blame her mother for introducing a daughter who would grow up to create shows that bring those belching stepfathers and menopausal witches and bawdy jokes to the world of the stage. I think we can safely blame her father for the swearing.
She started ballet lessons when she was 4. She really thought she would be a ballerina. “And puberty ruined that with the massive double-Gs I have attached to my chest. And also I’ve always been funny. I was always Jeremy Fisher the frog [from the Beatrix Potter book], not the swan.” She got her first laugh when she was 4 and playing a mouse. There was a gigantic mouse hole as a stage set and she somehow managed to knock it over. “I went, all right, yes. I like that noise and have been somewhat addicted to that ever since.”
She did dance all the way through primary school then drama at secondary school. She had her first epileptic seizure during a school assembly. She was prescribed medication which, she says, nobody told her “could make you hungry”. She put on a lot of weight and spent miserable years on diet plans. She remembers going to buy a pair of jeans when she was 16 and asking to try on the next size up. “And they’re, like, ‘Oh, we don’t make those.’”
She continued doing drama at university and began trying out for auditions. She did get one job. For an advertisement. She was to play a gymnast, balancing on a beam. “The ad was for reinforced wood.”
There was a role for a ballroom-dancing nurse on Shortland Street. “But this doctor doesn’t want to dance with you because you’re too fat. So that’s the thing about hustle, right? You have to have skin like a rhino, really. And I do and I don’t. It gets to you, you know, when you get ignored for things and you perceive that you’re ignored. So then you just keep pushing and, what gets me, you might be judged for the pushing: ‘You kept selling out.’ How else do you pay for your bras?”
The art of the hustle. It’s a survival technique. She realised early on in her acting career she wasn’t going to get the auditions she wanted so she made her own shows and, of course, cast herself in them. If you cast yourself you get all the good roles. She is always the leading lady and she gets to play all the supporting roles. She is also her own publicist so she can sell her own show.
Bawdy hustler
As previously mentioned, I had given up attempting to get a question past her so I just sat on the end of the phone. It was, I told her later, the easiest interview I had ever not done. I didn’t have to do any work. She said, bossily, “Ha. You’ve got work to do now.”
She has had considerable success with her Jane Austen shows, Promise and Promiscuity: A new musical by Jane Austen and Penny Ashton and her take on Sense and Sensibility, performed by other actors.
How to define success? “I’ve got fans!” Some of her fans turn up in Austen-era replica bonnets. She has toured from “Edinburgh and Edmonton to Mosgiel”. Also Carterton. She told me to come to see her next time she’s performing in a school gym in Carterton. It wasn’t a request; it was an order. Did I happen to mention she is a bit bossy? Did I happen to mention she is more than a bit bawdy? From Promise and Promiscuity: “He has an exuberance for formal dances.’’ “Oh, I love balls.”
This might be another definition of theatrical success: she has merch. This hustle business is as contagious as swearing. Go on – admit your life would not be complete without an Austen-themed fridge magnet or tea towel. They are actually pretty covetable. Who would not want to dry one’s dishes with a tea towel that reads, “How can one be sad when there is cake?” Her favourite is “Watch Out, Fanny’s About!” Of course it is – it’s rude.
From an Edmonton Sun review of Promise in 2014: “Somewhere Jane is smiling.” In her ideal fantasy, she would bring Jane Austen into the now so that she could see what amazing success she’s had since her death in 1817, aged 41.
As a sheila and a feminist comic, Ashton comes in for the most unbelievable crap. She has been introduced as a slut, “You may have seen her around because she’s been around.” The most outrageously misogynist introduction doesn’t bear, and certainly doesn’t deserve, repeating. But there she is, waiting to come on to the stage to be funny and instead she is furious. She responded by saying to the MC: “‘Thanks. You’ve always been a bit of a c***.’ And then the audience goes, ‘Oh, we like that MC. Who’s this nasty lady?’ Because, you know, women aren’t supposed to swear.”
I later sent an email to say that I had to have a lie down after being talked at by her. “Imagine how entertaining I am on stage.” There she goes again. Hustle, hustle.
Good for her. She’s feisty, funny and endlessly entertaining. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be told to fuck off by. She said, “Good. I’ll tell you to fuck off any time.”