Profile
A polymath of the stage, Gillian Cosgriff brings her new show to the upcoming Adelaide Cabaret Festival, steering away from topicality to interactive games. By Daniel Herborn.
‘I get bored very easily’: Gillian Cosgriff on being a performance all-rounder
Raised in a boisterous extended family with four siblings and 20 aunts and uncles, Gillian Cosgriff thought nothing of attending gatherings where each household would sing a song or perform a skit. “As I’m talking about it now, it sounds like a cult,” she says, laughing. “But if you grow up like that, you think, yeah, this is normal. Hey, what number are you guys doing for Nan’s 80th? I’ve got dibs on ‘Castle on a Cloud’.”
A comedian, actor, composer, writer, musician and singer, Cosgriff has graduated to bigger stages across theatre, cabaret, musicals and television comedy, both scripted (Utopia) and improvised (Thank God You’re Here). In 2022 she also directed Michelle Brasier’s award-winning television comedy special Average Bear, and is currently working on The Fig Tree, an “existential rom-com” musical.
“I really like having all of them,” she says of the different strands in her CV. “It’s nice to be able to go, Oh, I’ll write this thing for someone and I’ll direct this, or I’m just going to be in this play. I get bored very easily.”
In conversation, Cosgriff is warm and personable but, just as her cabaret shows tackle wealth inequality or the climate crisis with a lightness of touch, she doesn’t shy away from the self-doubt and economic grind that comes with being an artist. She has long been convinced that she needed to be on stage – she started piano and ballet lessons at five – but was also often unsure she belonged there. “So much of being an artist is fluctuating wildly between thinking no one cares and no one’s looking at you, to being like, ‘Oh no, everyone’s looking at you, say something valuable!’ and living between those two extremes,” she says.
During the 2023 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Cosgriff experienced both sides of this coin when her vox pop musical comedy show, Actually, Good, was an unexpected hit. Returning to comedy after performing in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for three years, her expectations were low. “This is going to look so dark written down, but I didn’t think I was anything or the show was anything,” she says. “I had no idea.”
Rhys Nicholson saw the show a couple of nights in and messaged Cosgriff to say they thought it was special. “That message meant a lot to me,” says Cosgriff. “This is someone who I think is one of the single best comedians in the world and they’ve identified something in this show. I was like, Huh, this is different.”
Momentum around Actually, Good – which involved surveying the audience for suggestions on things they love – kept building. Cosgriff was nominated for the Golden Gibbo award and Most Outstanding Show, both of which she won.
She quizzed Nicholson and Geraldine Hickey, two previous winners, about their respective award-winning seasons. “I said, ‘Did you feel like you were just doing what you’d always been doing?’, and they both said ‘yes’. So that was a weird thing about it – why is this special now? I didn’t know.”
Musicals have long been part of her life. She would sing along to the classics on family car rides and pored over the programs her parents brought home from Les Misérables or The Phantom of the Opera. The second oldest of five, she corralled the younger kids into her self-penned plays, musicals and dance performances. “As an older sibling, you have a tailor-made company to work with,” she explains. “I was very bossy, which I have since apologised for.”
By her mid teens, she was writing lyrics. While some performers have spun cringe-inducing comedy from revisiting their early creative efforts, Cosgriff says she is unlikely to go down that path. She recently came across some old notebooks from this time. “Seeing what the 17-year-old me had to say about the world – oh gosh, the physical anguish! I have not felt a pain like it [since].”
Studying music theatre at the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), she was surrounded by other aspiring artists, living with them in share houses and hanging out seven days a week. The class sizes were small and the cohort was tight-knit. At the time it felt utopian, though the passing of time has cast it in a different light. “I was making terrible choices,” says Cosgriff. “I was so scared and borderline malnourished. Just because you can live on sticky date pudding and red wine doesn’t mean you should.”
After graduating, Cosgriff returned to Melbourne, where she had lived as a child. She worked in hospitality and piano accompaniment jobs while chipping away at the audition circuit. “You’re trying to be what you think they want. I did a lot of that,” she says. “I would think that I’d chosen the perfect song to audition for a show, but it wasn’t a perfect song for me. I was trying too hard and people could probably tell. Losing all of that network [from university], I was very lonely, very poor and I just couldn’t get a job.” Sometimes, serving canapés at Melbourne Theatre Company on opening night, she felt the ache of being so close to where she wanted to be.
Cosgriff wasn’t just waiting around for opportunities – she created them by writing cabaret shows. David and Lisa Campbell, then directors of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, picked up her first, Waitressing... and Other Things I Do Well, for a tour. While it would be years before she broke through to a wider audience, the classic Cosgriff formula – galloping, catchy melodies with clever lyrics touching on insecurity and frustration – was in place early on.
Reviews of Cosgriff’s theatre work inevitably described her as likeable even when they were unenthused about the production. Even so, she found networking a struggle. “I thought it must be this schmoozing thing where you’re putting yourself out there, and I didn’t know how to do that,” she says. “Then after enough years, I realised that networking is just about being kind and good at what you do and people will eventually say your name in rooms and ask you to do it.”
She found her niche in a branch of Melbourne’s cabaret scene with multitalented performers who can thrive in the comedy world but are not strictly of it. She also started performing in Spontaneous Broadway, building up the ability to improvise lyrics, which is a big part of her shows today. The late Cal Wilson and Melbourne improv legend Rik Brown (“who I’m obsessed with to this day”), also helped her to build skills and she studied the narrative stand-up comedy of James Acaster and Daniel Kitson to learn about structure.
She worked on a web series, more cabaret and theatre, and an opera, Lorelei. Though Cosgriff describes the latter as “not even in the same postcode as my comfort zone”, collaborating on lyrics with Casey Bennetto gave her a new way to talk about writing, which she had previously done intuitively.
She relished the opportunity to play against her usual geniality in a cameo as a villainous real estate agent in Aunty Donna’s Coffee Cafe. The sketch group had written the part for close friend Michelle Brasier, who recommended Cosgriff when she got stuck overseas. “That was fun because Braze and I are very different and it’s not something people would normally ask me to do,” Cosgriff recalls. “It was ostensibly just me saying the c-word a lot. People don’t know this about me, but that’s one of my favourite pastimes.”
Cosgriff’s varied work reflects a multidisciplinary talent but also a performer who is more focused on cultivating a steady stream of work than chasing a particular pet project. “What’s very common in the arts is that you have this incredible job but that job has an end date,” she tells me. “It can rob you of the enjoyment of finishing the chapter because you’re suddenly looking around going, where will I go after this? Or will I drown?”
While she is now in demand on television and the festival circuit, the memory of those early years of struggle remains vivid. “It makes me weird when I meet people who are freshly graduated,” she says. “I met some the other night and I was like, ‘How are you guys? Are you miserable? Do you need any help?’ ”
Her firsthand experience of the industry’s economic realities also informs her thoughts on arts funding. When the country emerged from the Covid-19 lockdowns, she advocated for a universal basic income for arts workers. “I still feel very strongly about it, but I also recognise that I would like to see funding going to a number of other issues,” she says. “What is interesting to me is what we’re watching happen in America and even Australia in the last couple of years – the censoring of artists. It’s wild. But the weird thing is it’s the clearest feedback you can have as an artist that art matters.”
So prone to worry that she wrote a whole festival show about it, Cosgriff has often wrestled with how much to engage with a depressing news cycle. Sometimes the choice is made for her, when she appears on panel shows such as Question Everything or Charlie Pickering’s Thank God It’s Friday! radio program, both of which involve comics riffing on the day’s headlines. “When I go and see my parents, literally every day, my mum will put on the news at six o’clock and I think: You have this on every day?” she says. “This can’t be good for you, it’s too much. There’s a quote I love from a cartoon that says, ‘My desire to be informed is at odds with my desire to remain sane.’ ”
For this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival, in June, Cosgriff is eschewing topicality for a late-night interactive show titled There Is Nothing Like a Game!, building on a spot she did in Reuben Kaye’s variety show, The Kaye Hole, last year. She would sing the first line of a song, and audience members had to guess what it was. The winner received a glass of champagne, and Kaye and Virginia Gay kicked off their heels to race through the crowd, ferrying drinks. “That got out of hand,” she recalls. “Everyone got very competitive.”
She says one of her favourite things about Adelaide Cabaret Festival is that the audience really feels like they’re a part of the festival. “People dress up, see three shows in a night and end up at Trevor Jones’s piano bar,” she says. “I wanted to make a show that was like, ‘Oh, you want to be part of this? Let’s go.’ ”
Being on the festival circuit means a lot of living out of a suitcase, often staying in grimy accommodation for a notoriously expensive event such as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Does Cosgriff enjoy this side of performing or is it more just the price you have to pay?
“It’s definitely both,” she says. “It’s easy to romanticise it when you’re not doing it, like how you romanticise your 20s a little bit. You go through the same thing with any of the festivals that are a month long. At the start, you’re so excited about everything that’s happening. By about the end of week two, you start saying to other comedians: ‘This is too long, isn’t it?’ Then you get to week four and you can’t believe it’s going to be over. It’s a consenting toxic relationship.”
Still, the possibilities of the form keep Cosgriff coming back. “It’s just talking and music but whatever you want to do within that. What I like about it is the direct connection; you’re allowed to look people in the eye and that’s what’s exciting about it.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 31, 2025 as "Funny girl".
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