Sarah-Louise Young returns to Fringe World 2025 in An Evening Without Kate Bush at State Theatre Centre of WA

While leaping around like an idiot in a leotard for laughs is the main objective for Sarah-Louise Young in her critically acclaimed cabaret style homage An Evening Without Kate Bush, an unexpected positive has also emerged during her joyful, inclusive, celebratory love letter to Bush fans and their adoration of her music. “I make a joke at my own expense about my age, but it’s amazing how many women of my age and older will come and say ‘oh, we love the fact that you’re visible’,” 49-year-old Manchester-based Young shares. “I think the world is becoming less of an ageist society, but there’s something lovely about being this age and d…ing around in a leotard. Being allowed to be who I am, with the body that I’ve got, that’s lived quite a few decades and is not the body of a 20-year-old. It’s one of the things I like about the show because it’s a beautiful celebration of just being alive, in whatever condition.” Born in Kent as the youngest of five siblings — explaining her self-confessed desire to shout for attention — Young’s theatre addiction began from an early age when her single-parent mum would endeavour to take them all to the local university student productions. However, it was not until she experienced her first Edinburgh Festival Fringe as an 18-year-old that Young was blown away by the variety of theatre, and suddenly something inside her clicked. “I was the last person to realise I was going to be a performer, it was no surprise to anyone else,” she muses. “I thought ‘oh yeah, this is what I’m meant to be doing.’ I’ve been going to the Edinburgh Fringe for 28 years, and I’m now on the board of directors for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society. Somebody asked me my stats, and I think I’ve done 17 Fringes and 42 shows over that time, which is crazy, but it’s where I’ve been able to take new work.” An invitation to perform at the curated Adelaide Cabaret Festival opened further doors, resulting in her West End musical tribute show Julie Madly Deeply honouring Dame Julie Andrews, written with UK-based artist Russell Lucas, which in turn led to them making An Evening Without Kate Bush. “There’s been a lovely kind of cyclical relationship with the Edinburgh Fringe and with the Adelaide Cabaret Festival,” Young says. “I have a lot of gratitude to Australia in general for fostering me as an artist. They’ve put a lot of time and money and belief into me. Arts funding is falling apart all over the world, but in the UK especially it’s on its knees.” Julie Madly Deeply had introduced Young and Lucas to the idea of the fan’s relationship with an artist, abundantly aware they were holding people’s childhoods in their hands through their great love of Mary Poppins and The Sound Of Music. “That kind of got us really interested in ‘what does the artist hold and what do the fans bring to the conversation?’ which led us to talk about the fact that Kate Bush hadn’t performed live for 35 years, and yet her fan base is still immensely strong,” Young recounts. “We started making the (Kate Bush) show, and then about six months into making the show in 2014, she announced her comeback. We were absolutely flawed because we thought ‘well, we’re very excited because we love her, but we can’t make this show, people will think we are just cashing in on her return’ and we were heartbroken. “It had become An Evening Without Kate Bush because she wasn’t there, but the fans (affectionately called Fish People in a nod to Bush’s record label) were and the love was there. We wanted to explore the fan’s experience and had already started interviewing fans and collecting their stories. We shelved the show for almost five years and didn’t bring it back until 2019, when we felt it had been a respectful period of time after her live comeback.” Following sold-out seasons in the UK and a new generation of fans discovering Bush’s music thanks to Running Up That Hill’s resurgence via Stranger Things, An Evening Without Kate Bush returns to Australia for the third time, second for Perth, at Fringe World 2025. The show celebrates the beauty and diversity of Bush’s music, plus her spirit of playfulness, which Young refers to as the “essence of Kate”. “I never impersonate her and you don’t need me to,” she says. “I was born in 1975 so have very early memories of leaping around the living room to Wuthering Heights, like a lot of people, and then she became the soundtrack to my life because she’s created music over five decades. “The show was also designed to have the feel that it had kind of erupted from a suitcase. It was made in a living room . . . and has that kind of homespun feeling, because that’s the guilty pleasure, of just grabbing a pair of red tights and leaping around in your living room. It wanted to have that feel, that you too could just get up and make your tribute, whatever that was.” An Evening Without Kate Bush is at Rehearsal Room 1, State Theatre Centre of WA, January 28 to February 2, tickets at fringeworld.com.au.