SIX star Alexia: 'I think it's quite inspirational'
Currently running at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, SIX follows the six wives of the infamous English King Henry VIII as they take to the mic to tell their own personal tales, remixing five hundred years of historical heartbreak into an 80-minute celebration of 21st century girl power.
For her performances, Alexia received an Olivier Award nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Musical and recently reprised the role on-screen in the record-breaking SIX the Musical Live.
RTÉ Entertainment caught up with her the day after the show opened in Dublin and she was in great form. "Oh, it was brilliant," she said when asked about opening night. "I always enjoy performing SIX, it's such a great vibe."
And she speaks as someone who there, back at the start, of course . . .
"Yeah, back in 2018. The original. It's been quite a journey. It's been a dream come true for me."
SIX has enjoyed a remarkable run of success since then. Unlike most hit shows, it was a first-time effort from Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, a pair of students who thought it would be a good idea to write a musical about the six wives of Henry VII from the wives' perspectives.
They couldn't have dreamed of the heights the show has attained.
It became a global hit that rocked both London's West End and Broadway in New York. No mean feat.
"Exactly!" says Alkexia. "And I remember getting the phone call asking if I'd like to audition. Two students from Cambridge have made this musical. And none of us really knew what it was about.
"So we were thrown in at the deep end. I was cast at the last minute, then a week later we hadn't read the script but had to rehearse a song to then perform at West End Live in Trafalgar Square.
"You can look that up on YouTube. It's in a raw format. We're all in our clothes (laughs) - and we still hadn't read the script yet!
"To see it become the phenomenon that it is, is just amazing."
With the exception of prog rock keyboard whiz Rick Wakeman's 1973 concept album The Six Wives of Henry VIII, it's not a subject that would've been part of pop culture.
Naturally, it's also not the kind of topic that would feature highly in history lessons in Irish schools, but Alexia McIntosh grew up in Birmingham. Even then, she admits no previous expertise on the subject before SIX came calling.
"Well, in school you're taught a bit about Tudor history . . . you don't really go into detail. For me, I knew kind of the basics, but to be able to research these women, it just changes your whole outlook on life because you can't believe what was going on in those times - and what they got away with, really.
As for Henry himself? "He was a bit bipolar I think! If you got on the wrong side of him, you would end up dead! I think people were walking on eggshells, to be honest."And a lot of these women were teenagers, they were Ladies in Waiting. To know that they all knew each other and some form of friendship, association, makes it even more amazing.
"Because that's not really taught [in English schools]: how he was cheating on his wife with this one; he was in love with these teenage girls; it starts to become really dark when you get into the nitty-gritty of what went on.
"I think I was shocked. Disgusted. These women really do need a voice, to say what they went true - we just need to keep their legacy alive."
Of course, that's the thing about SIX - it takes this dark tale, six of them really, and turns it in a joyous, uplifting show. That's quite an achievement. The fact that it's been such a hit – and not just in its native England, but all around the world – tells a tale about its impact as a show.
"They always say there's nothing new under the sun," says Alexia. "Unfortunately, people will experience some form of trauma in their lives.
"I think that the style of the show is telling these stories through songs so that makes it more palatable . . . and actually, we need to celebrate these lives and show that there is hope.
"I think it's quite inspirational and that's why people gravitate towards this musical."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Examiner
29 minutes ago
- Irish Examiner
Beginner's pluck: English teacher and Waterford native Rose Keating
A prolific reader, Rose has always been drawn towards horror — and as a child avidly read her mother's collection. 'There was a lot of Stephen King, and Anne Rice,' she says. At 12, Rose enrolled on a writing course organised by Waterford Youth Arts, and afterwards, become involved in both writing and theatre projects. 'At university I became more aware of literary fiction, and for a while I drifted away from horror, but I'm back to it now, although my tastes have become wider.' After graduating from UCC, Rose moved to Norwich, but covid struck, so her MA in creative writing was all online. 'But I loved it. I wrote the majority of the stories in Oddbody. We met, casually, once we could.' It was the first time I'd made writing friends — people who were going to be published. She stayed in Norwich afterwards, waitressing and bar tending. 'But I drifted, and didn't do much writing.' After a year, she returned to Ireland. With stories published in literary magazines, Rose has received numerous awards including the Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship, the Curtis Brown Award, and, in 2022, an Arts Council Agility Award. 'That really helped the collection.' Who is Rose Keating? Date/ place of birth: 1997/ Waterford. Education: St Angela's, Waterford. University College Cork, English literature. 'I was on the Quercus scholarship programme.' University of East Anglia, MA in creative writing prose fiction. Home: Thailand. Family: Mum, three brothers, lots of cousins, nieces and nephews, and family dog, Lexi. 'An old, ugly mutt.' The day job: English teacher to six to eights year olds. 'It's the first job that's made me happy.' In another life: 'I'd like to work with animals somewhere warm out in nature.' Favourite writers: Leonora Carrington; Lorrie Moore; Raymond Carver: Camilla Grudova; Satyaka Murata; Ernest Hemingway. Second book: 'More short stories.' Top tip: 'Read beyond what you, yourself, are writing.' Website: Instagram: @Rose_Keating_ The debut Oddbody Canongate, €16.99 A woman lives, uneasily, with a ghost; an actress has parts of her cut off to gain a role. These weird, unsettling stories focused on the body explore themes of desire, anxiety, and shame. How far can the human form be pushed and subverted? The verdict: Playful, funny, and provocative, these stories are strangely compulsive. Rose Keating will appear at the West Cork Literary Festival on Tuesday, July 15.
Irish Examiner
29 minutes ago
- Irish Examiner
Book review: Memoir rich in literary allusion, social mobility, and so much more
It has become commonplace to laud English writer Geoff Dyer for his versatility, but that makes the praise no less valid. A multi-awarding author of numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, criticism, and other surprisingly genre-defying books, he has now turned his highly accomplished hand to memoir. Homework is an account of Dyer's upbringing in Cheltenham in the 1960s and '70s, a world he evokes in gloriously minute, Proustian detail. Dyer's 1960s working-class childhood is depicted as unapologetically ordinary, filled with the boyish toys and past times that arouse gentle nostalgia for the mid-20th-century world. He writes charmingly about his ever-growing collections of army figurines, Airfix models, Action Man dolls, and bubblegum cards, of playing conkers in the autumn, of the colours and tastes of long-gone sweets, and the rapture of receiving annuals at Christmas. Later, Dyer writes with understated wit and self-deprecation about his adolescent schooldays, detailing his clumsy efforts with girls, his love of football (undiminished by his own mediocrity at the sport), his bookishness, his embarrassing puberty, and his developing sense of physical inferiority. Surrounded by an array of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, being an only child was never a cause for loneliness. A young Geoff Dyer in his bedroom in his family's home in Cheltenham, England. But, naturally, the two central people in his life — and in the book — are his parents. His portrayal of his reticent, Methodist-background mother Phyllis, whose birthmark tragically afflicted her entire sense of self, is tender and moving. Dyer's more complicated portrait of his father Arthur, a Labour-supporting, Thatcher-despising, staunchly anti-Royalist engineer, is of an unusually tight-fisted and tight-lipped man, who was also self-sacrificing and without any real meanness. He stresses that although they were not poor, his father's internalisation of the wartime rationing spirit simply meant he would never spend any money. Dyer presents distinct dead or diminishing worlds. There is his own vanishing world, the source of the memoir itself. There is the dying world of his parents' generation, and before them, his grandparents', whose farming lives were to the young writer an alien mixture of myth and the Victorian fiction of Thomas Hardy. Dyer's family history also acts as an account of social mobility in England over a century or so. His mother's father, a veteran of the Battle of the Somme, was an illiterate man from rural Shropshire, while much of Arthur Dyer's young life was shaped by the parsimony and violence of wartime experiences. Arthur is depicted increasingly at odds with the post-war consumer boom, constantly complaining about the cost of things, at one point even putting so little petrol in his beloved Vauxhall Victor that he has to coast down inclining roads. Even so, his father could not stop the forces of progress. In 1970, the family moved to a bigger home and, later, Dyer went to study in Oxford. Although Homework is not a book about Dyer's formation as a writer, it is a book rich in literary allusion. Yet, this literariness is never heavy-handed but lightly worn and always illuminating. Dyer is an immensely skilled writer, one who can seamlessly switch from joyfully endorsing his childhood love of sugar to considering, by way of Roland Barthes, the semiotics of an old family photograph. Like all the best memoirs, Homework also reflects on the process of recollection as well as offering a defence of it: 'Can't memory', he asks, 'be a species or form of fact?' The facts of his youth, as he recalls them here, are poignant, joyous, funny, sad and evocative, and offer a portrait of a life of reasonable contentment in post-war England that feels at once both fading and familiar.
The Irish Sun
4 hours ago
- The Irish Sun
I went on the bucket-list Intrepid tour with world-famous beaches, legendary football and 80p cocktails
'I CAN'T dance . . . I'm English,' I insisted in my woeful Spanish. Milandra wasn't taking no for an answer, though, and forced me to my feet. Advertisement 8 I went on a bucket list South America Tour, pictured Rio de Janeiro in Brazil Credit: Getty 8 Relax on world famous Copacabana beach Credit: Getty Before I knew what was happening, she and I were locked in a tight embrace, spinning around the dance floor. I usually avoid dancing in public, but in Buenos Aires, the tango is so culturally important, I felt it would be rude not to try. So I'd paid a visit to one of the city's milongas — ramshackle dance clubs found throughout the Argentine capital — where dance enthusiasts assemble every night to cut a rug with one another. I just hoped the locals wouldn't be too offended by what was essentially an act of desecration on my part, as I clumsily stumbled around the room, trying my best to stay on my feet while not crushing Milandra's. Advertisement READ MORE ON TRAVEL They say it takes two to tango, but really, she was the only one contributing to our performance. I was merely there — a practice dummy, as useful and as graceful as a big sack of sugar, but still, somehow, absolutely thrilled to be a part of it. That's the overriding emotion of South America — sheer and simple joy. I walked around in persistant child-like wonder, gawping idiotically at everything I found myself immersed in. Advertisement Most read in News Travel Nowhere else was that more prevalent than Iguazu Falls, the centrepiece of Intrepid's seven-day Best of Argentina and Brazil tour that starts in Buenos Aires and ends in Rio de Janeiro, via a two-day trip to the most breath-taking natural park I have ever visited. In places like this, guides will lower expectations by explaining that they 'can't promise anything' when it comes to which wildlife will make an appearance. Outside of New York City I found vineyards, breweries and a race track They needn't be so cagey in Iguazu, with the sprawling stretch of jungle that saddles the border between the two countries packed with a gloriously diverse wealth of creatures. Toucans and parrots flew overhead, capybaras relaxed in the cooling waters of the Iguazu River and mischievous coati, a relative of the raccoon, flocked to picnic areas to fight over tourists' dropped scraps. Advertisement All of this, and so much more, plays out in front of the most awe-inspiring backdrop, the falls, which were officially declared one of the New 7 Wonders of Nature in 2011. 'Thrilling ambience' Rickety walkways offer vantage points to view most of the landmark's astounding angles, although guests can also take helicopter rides overhead, as well as a boat ride that is slightly more extreme than its name suggests. My fellow sailors and I were tossed about in our seats as our high-powered vessel first took on a barrage of rapids, before the skilled driver zipped in and out of some of the falls' more powerful sections, completely drenching each of us to the bone. I can't remember ever being quite so soaked, but the cool waters of the aggressive power shower were very refreshing in the 38C heat. Advertisement It also enabled me to gain a truer appreciation of the force of nature I had been lucky enough to spend two exhilarating days exploring. Luckily, the opportunity to relax was provided at my final stop, Rio, where the locals on the famous Copacabana beach go out of their way to prevent you from having to do anything at all. After renting a chair for the day for just £2, I was approached by a steady stream of men with barbecues offering to cook enormous prawns, grilled cheeses or various meats without me ever needing to move from my spot. 8 Iguazu Falls is the centrepiece of Intrepid's seven-day Best of Argentina and Brazil tour Credit: Getty Advertisement 8 Toucans fill the jungle Credit: Getty Even more pleasing was the constant flow of vendors serving refreshing caipirinhas, the Brazilian's cocktail of choice — a dangerously drinkable mix of sugar, limes and cachaca, a local spirit made from fermented sugar cane that has the strength of a Long Island iced tea masked by the sweetness of a can of Lilt. They're not just found by the beach, either. In fact, they're sold from stalls throughout the city and range in price from 80p to around £3, according to the extensive research that I selflessly conducted. They're even sold at the city's tourist spots, with bars found on top of Sugarloaf Mountain, which offers stunning views over the city's beaches and coruscating favelas, as well as the Selaron Steps — 215 stairs colourfully decorated with tiles by Chilean artist Jorge Selaron that connect the city centre with the flamboyantly graffitied Santa Teresa neighbourhood. Advertisement Perilous perch The main sight to see is the Christ The Redeemer statue, which has stood atop Mount Corcovado since 1931. It's an impressive monument to behold, particularly up close, where the craftsmanship that went into carving Jesus' face almost 100 years ago can be truly admired. From its perilous perch, tourists can pick out other famous sights, including the stage where most of Rio's carnival celebrations take place, and the Maracana stadium, where the Brazilian national football team and Flamengo play. South American fans are considered to be among the more rambunctious, so, keen to see what all the fuss was about, I got myself a ticket, with Intrepid's tours including matches as an optional extra. Advertisement The streets surrounding the 78,000-seat arena were bursting with life from as much as two hours before kick-off, with barbecues, beer and, of course, caipirinhas all on offer, as Flamengo fans in their Dennis The Menace-esque black and red home shirts made their way to the ground. Once inside the legendary stadium, the noise and atmosphere only intensified, with samba beats being beaten loudly from drums, while pyrotechnics and giant flags enhanced the thrilling ambience. I did my best to sing along with the home fans, despite not knowing any Portuguese, and by the end I felt like an honorary member of their troop as we roared on Flamengo to a hard-fought 1-0 win. Then, as the fans filtered out afterwards, singing and dancing into the night, I ordered a final caipirinha and already began to feel a profound sense of longing for this truly magnificent part of the world before I'd even started packing for my flight home the next morning. Advertisement Luckily, with trips like Intrepid's highlights tour, it's easy enough to plan another visit for the not-too-distant future. I just need to make sure I take a few tango lessons beforehand, so I can sweep Milandra off her feet next time, instead of almost standing all over them. 8 The tango is so culturally important to Argentina Credit: Getty 8 Enjoy a kickabout at the Maracanã, Brazil Credit: Getty Advertisement 8 There is a constant flow of vendors serving refreshing caipirinhas Credit: Getty 8 A macaw at Iguazu falls Credit: Getty GO: South America Tour GETTING THERE: Air Europa flies from the UK to Buenos Aires in Argentina from £636 return. See TOURING THERE: A seven-day Best of Argentina & Brazil tour costs from £2,304pp including accommodation, transfers, tours and some meals (six breakfasts, one lunch and one dinner). Flights cost extra, but Intrepid can book these for travellers along with their tour. See
