When Layton Williams was growing up on a council estate in Bury, he was one of the lads. I was smarter than that. I wanted a simpler life. I do have a chill button. The problem was, there was another side to him desperate to come out. How different life would have been.
If only eight-year-old Williams could have watched his year-old self on Strictly Come Dancing. He danced a fiery samba, a sexual tension-laden tango, a playful quickstep, his outfits running the gamut from plunging sequinned jumpsuit to suit, tie and braces. I was really adamant that I wanted to do that when I was on Strictly , because I wanted to normalise someone being whoever they wanted to be. It worked. Get in there. Do it.
Shout out [director] Stephen Daldry for taking a gamble on me. It was around then that he first met other gay people. I was at theatre school for goodness sake. Soon afterwards his voice broke, he lost his job in Thriller Live , and he ended up living back in Bury with his grandfather. So from there I was just being me. And the real me. It was fun β but the stage is his first love. Rhea Norwood is Sally Bowles, a struggling nightclub performer down on her luck, who falls in love with an American writer Michael Ahomka-Lindsay just as the Nazis are rising to power.
The Emcee is both literal Emcee of the nightclub, and an omniscient, shapeshifting narrator, who not only observes but encourages both the hedonism and the evil around him. He is magnetic to watch. We can switch it up if we need to. Seven people have taken on the role of the Emcee in this production since Eddie Redmayne, but Williams is the first Black person.
It was awful. The energy and temperature just immediately drops. And some people nervously laugh. This is a dark production, then, but Williams tries to leave all that on the stage. Let it just be free and easy. Every night, he comes off stage and leaves the theatre via the silver-glittering stage door to take pictures with fans.
