Hello and welcome to the National Trust Podcast.

My name is Misty Monique, a drag queen and guest presenter for this episode.

Today I'm heading to Smallhythe place in the Kentish countryside,

best known as the home of a celebrated Victorian actress.

But I'll be heading out into the garden to a barn and working theatre,

there I'll be exploring the history of drag.

And the stage’s links to the LGBTQ+ community.

And I'll be putting on a special performance of my own.

In a nutshell, drag will typically include

exploring gender through performance for the purposes of entertainment.

Performers come in all shapes and sizes.

There are drag queens like me, drag kings and drag things.

The term drag is a bit of a mystery.

One of the most popular ideas is that male performers performed as women back

in Shakespeare's day and that the robes they wore would drag on the stage floor.

Another theory is that it's a combination of the two words Grand

and Rag used to refer as the costumes performers wear.

I wouldn't say anything particularly grand in my wardrobe,

but they’re definitely not rags!

[Background sound of performance] Stand up and turn around...stand up.

Drag performances have been around for centuries, all across the world.

With each country having its own style and story to tell.

In the UK, drag has been one of the mainstays of light,

British entertainment on the stage, at the cinema and on TV.

As a nation, we have produced some of the greats like Lily Savage and Danny La Rue.

There have been sketches by the Two Ronnies,

a myriad of gender swaps in Blackadder

and primetime shows like the UK version of RuPaul's Drag Race.

And if you're still thinking you've not seen drag, let me tell you.

Oh, yes, you have.

If you've been to a panto, then you've essentially seen drag

and while today tv or streaming are the easiest way to see drag,

live performances happen up and down the country

in towns and cities in theatres, bars and clubs.

Whether that's traditional cabaret or as part of a drag bingo or drag brunch event.

At my home in Cheltenham in Gloucestershire,

one of the regular places

I grace the stage is an old 17th century barn in the town centre.

So in an attempt to sprinkle

a little bit of drag glitter across the boards in a more rural setting,

I'm heading to the theatre in the barn at Smallhythe Place in the Kent countryside.

Yeah so when I read about National Trust Theatre,

this is not what I had in mind at all,

this is a much older, smaller building than I expected.

It is very interesting. I just can't imagine

doing a drag show here.

It's very out the way [...] it’s quite pretty though.

Smallhythe place is a cosy Tudor cottage, just off the main road

between the towns of Tenterden and Rye.

And once home to the actress Ellen Terry and her daughter, Edy Craig.

Today I'm here to meet Susannah, who is going to tell me

more about the showbiz history behind its doors.

Hi Misty? How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm Susannah.

I'm the senior house and collections officer here.

So welcome to Smallhythe. Thank you.

Right. Come through this way into the theatre then. Fabulous.

Wow. That's quite a surprise, isn't it?

It's a very deep stage. It takes up a lot of space.

Yeah, takes up most of the building, in fact.

Yeah.

To begin with, I think the stage was pretty much 1930s trestle tables

and there were benches and the stage was lit with with car headlights.

It's still quite basic, but it's a fantastic performance space.

You're going to use it.

I am, yes!

It looks

like it's been here for a very long time.

It's not something I would typically do drag.

It's not somewhere where you would expect drag to be, I believe either.

Um, especially our kind of drag, which is very modern and very current.

This isn't. But again, not in a rude way.

Maybe that's just the building

because Edy Craig did some really experimental theatre on this stage.

So they did some things that the audience will find really difficult sometimes

and very experimental. So, you know.

Perhaps it's the most perfect space to do it.

do a modern drag show? [Talking over one another] Yeah.

Maybe it just is.

It's easy to picture drag as it is today,

but its roots go much further back.

In Shakespeare's time, it was forbidden for women to be involved

in stage performance,

which meant men and boys or seniors and juniors

as they were known, were called upon to play all the female parts.

While this is done out of necessity.

They opened the doors for performers to have total freedom of expression.

This period, beginning in the 16th century, is seen

as a pivotal moment in the history of drag.

Does a full range

of different parts for boys to play as women.

And we know from eyewitness reports of performances

that they were wholly believed.

So if you get a letter, say, written by somebody who'd seen a play

like Othello, there’s somebody in 1610,

he writes a letter about seeing Othello, and he talks about how good Desdemona was.

And he consistently describes her as she.

And he would absolutely have known that Desdemona was really being played by a boy.

I'm Dr.

Sophie Duncan and I'm a research fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Shakespeare remains the cultural constant of the British theatre.

In Shakespeare plays, quite often our heroine dresses up as a boy

for reasons of expedience or safety or adventure.

We don't know what women of the time

thought in terms of their nonparticipation in the theatre.

We know that, when in 1660, So after the English Civil War,

when Charles the second is crowned king and immediately sets up

indoor theatres and gives his patronage to them, actresses do well very quickly.

I think that the opportunities for gender

play and disguise and self-expression that come with all the different forms

of cross-dressing that happen in theatre, particularly British theatre,

have probably always been very important to people in the LGBTQ community.

In Ellen Terry's time at Smallhythe, when you look at the kind of creative

and personal networks that her daughter and her partners

were part of, Ellen Terry herself was a real icon for queer women.

After hearing more about Ellen Terry

and seeing the theatre, Susannah offered to take me into the house

to find out more about the previous occupants.

Ellen and Edy.

The reason that the National Trust have this house is because it was

the home of the great actress Ellen Terry.

She was one of the most famous, celebrated and adored celebrities of her time.

And she was at the height of her fame

in about the 1880s, hugely high earning with a really busy professional life.

So she bought this house in 1899 to get away from London.

She died here in 1928, and her daughter Edy, she created

this museum as a kind of shrine in honour of her mother.

What we've got stuffed into this beautiful Tudor building is one

woman's lifetime collection, carefully curated by her daughter.

And there is so much in here.

We have got a huge collection, you know, everything

from chipped plates through to great grand jewels and wonderful costumes.

So it is like when your grandma dies.

Those jewels might go missing. Just to warn you, I am a drag queen.

Yeah, well, I'm not going to let you near them.

I might show you the costumes, if you're lucky. Some great shoes.

Oh, yeah.

Size six. Sure I could squeeze in.

Well I'll try.

Edy Craig was an influential theatre maker herself.

She lived in a trio with two other women at Smallhythe place and the women's

private lives were intrinsically linked with the creative work they did there.

So you mentioned that there were three people next door.

How did that work? What was the living arrangement?

So Edy Craig, Ellen Terry’s daughter, lived next door

in the priest house with her partner, Chris St John,

and in about 1916, they were joined by Claire Attwood, known as Tony.

They were all lesbians.

How that worked for them, we don't really know.

Edy always referred to them as her family, so it had that sort of domestic feel.

They may Jam, they lived together in a kind of creative harmony, really.

This was their country place,

And I think it was somewhere they could absolutely be themselves.

They were constantly putting on plays in the theatre and Claire Attwood

would be creating props.

Chris St John would be translating something from German

and Edy would be conducting the whole affair.

I did speak to a very old lady who lives in the village up the road,

who remembers them coming to her Dad’s shop to buy Cigarettes and I said, What?

What did you make of them? She Oh yeah.

We just thought they were a bit eccentric they always wore men's clothes.

So I think people really respected them.

As well as cross-dressing in the everyday.

The trio would have also done so as part of their performances in the theatre.

For them, both creatively and personally, clothing was genderless.

Whether that was in the clothes they went to the shops

or the costumes they were wearing on the stage.

There's a little exhibition at the top of the garden, which looks at

how Edy and Tony and Chris lived.

But whilst we’re in the house, if you want to have a look at the costumes first.

Absolutely! I’d love to do that

Susanna begins guiding me around this beautiful house,

a wonky property with little trinkets hidden around every corner.

From the top of the stairs will just come in here, which is our costume room.

Now, we've got over 200 costumes in storage here at Smallhythe Place.

Ellen Terry was such a celebrity and was earning so much money

that her costumes became couture.

Edy was a costumier.

She didn't produce costumes like this.

She was much more likely to tie

four scarves together and make some fabulous outfit.

But she always managed her mum's costumes.

So one of the reasons they survive as well is because Edy looked after them.

The rhinestones I using on this

here are not too dissimilar to what I would wear in my jewlery.

So it's quite interesting to think that this was, what, 1800s?

And it's the same kind of thing.

obviously it looks very different now, and it's

a lot more intricate than the jewelry and the shiny things I would wear.

But it's interesting to see similarities.

It is and the dress itself is a very shiny thing

because it has all these iridescent beetle wings sewn on it.

So when you step onto the stage in a costume

like that, everything's sparkling off you and, you know,

so this is kind of Victorian attempt at real bling.

It feels to me... it feels draggy.

I know that sounds a bit silly, but to me that looks like drag.

That’s how I envision my kind of drag.

It's very costumey, it's very sparkly, it's very elegant, it's very

properly done up.

And to me that looks like a drag costume I would actually wear.

Like see you in it and I've got I've got, I've got a

we've got a copy here Perhaps you'd like to slip into later?

I will like to borrow it. Yes.

There's so much to see in here.

Yeah.

I think sometimes people visit here, they think they in a whip round

in three quarters of an hour and they're still here 3 hours later.

It's one of those.

But we've got something really special in the garden I'm going to show you now.

Let's go for it.

Nestled amongst this beautiful English country garden is a little shed,

a place for creativity to blossom.

And this little writing hut over here.

Well, I call it the writing hut because Chris used to write in it,

but I think they actually called it her

smoking hut at the time she was a chain smoker

and it was kind of her creative space.

So in we come,

Oh, look, this is interesting.

Vesta Tilley.

So she was a male impersonator who was really big in the 1900s.

There was a lot of male impersonators, not drag kings, I guess you call them now?

Yeah, same thing. And they were hugely popular.

There she is as well dressed as a police constable.

It is essentially drag. Yes.

Has there ever been drag here at all in the theatre?

Not as far as I know, although there may have been pantomimes, of course.

So the performance that we're due to do here,

that would be the first drag show here at the theatre?

Definitely.

One of the ways in which to connect drag

early roots with modern performances we know today is through pantomime.

In fact, the traditional Christmas panto says a lot more about British society

than you might think.

If we look at things like RuPaul’s drag race,

lip synching is a big aspect of that.

Do we see that in pantomime? Not much.

But do we see the sequins and the glamour

and the over-the-top ness of costuming and aesthetics? Yes.

Does all drag do that? No.

I'm Simon Sladen, senior curator of Modern and contemporary

theatre and performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

If you look at the history of pantomime,

in the studies of pantomime, it is obsessed with gender.

I mean, absolutely obsessed.

And if you ask people to define what a pantomime is,

they will absolutely say it's where boys play girls, girls play boys.

It's this topsy turvy world, and it opens up an opportunity

for thinking about fluidity between genders and interpretation.

The dame is there not really to provide any sense of

narrative, but for the comedy

license to play with

the audience, to interact with the audience.

I mean, arguably you could take them out of many of the shows

at the narrative wouldn't suffer, but it would be rather bland.

It's a family show.

But obviously the joy of a double entendre is that some people will understand it

and some won't.

Also, is there for a great aesthetic, you know, costumes

become more and more elaborate, particularly in the mid 20th century.

You know, the dame has the most extravagant costumes.

We certainly track tastes and trends through the Dame's costuming

and thinking of examples such as when the punk era,

the Ugly Sisters often have one of their changes where they would be punks,

which obviously had a great affinity to contemporary discourse around society.

So it's interesting to

think about those relationships and how they are perceived.

And of course, the pantomime Dame and the Principal Boy are two

the characters which may have gone through the most evolution as society's

ideas, thoughts, relationship

with gender and sexuality changes.

Today, a female Principal boy can be seen in probably 6 to 8% of pantomimes,

as opposed to almost 100% in that Victorian era.

Well, thank you so much for showing me around.

I am absolutely raring to go.

I'm going to have to call up my drag partner and get her down here and we'll

start planning ideas and do a show here.

Can't wait

then.

Turning it round

is beautiful.

It's gorgeous, isn't it?

It's stunning, actually.

Stunning.

It's a really, really deep stage as well as plenty of space.

Your signal most be shocking where you are It is, it isn’t great.

Right. I’ll message to then and I'll speak to you in a bit.

Ok speak to you soon! Bye.

The visit to Smallhythe Place left me feeling completely inspired

and the idea of taking to the stage and putting on a show

for everyone to enjoy is what really excites me about drag.

Growing up, I never really saw myself as a performer,

not in drag, not in panto, not on stage at all.

But I loved the glitz and glamour that came with it.

I remember as a young boy going to formal events like weddings

and feeling really restricted in what I was allowed to wear.

When women wear a variety of colours and accessories.

When I discovered drag,

I realized that this was the opportunity I needed as a kid to fully express myself.

In the world of drag.

There are hundreds of different styles and ways of performing.

It might involve singing, dancing, lip synching, or some comedy.

My style is a bit more modern and my drag partner, Miss Demeanor

McCall, is a little bit more the traditional old school British type.

Both of these styles themselves have gone through lots of changes, but looking

further back, drag performance has evolved far beyond Shakespeare's time.

And who knows what I might look like centuries from now.

It's now a few months on since I first visited.

It's show day and nerves are beginning

to set in as the crowd begins to arrive for our sold out event.

I literally just need to get to my dress.

I need to put my wig down.

Do you like my hair?

What time are we on now? Quarter past.

Can you necklace me up please?

It's so extra and diva-y.

Do you mind zipping up my shoes for me?

So sorry, I just can't Am I ok?

Alright head to toe?

Am I alright?

Gorge do I need to glue here?

I said I needed you, didn't I? Yeah.

I'm very nervous. I'll be honest.

I'm really, really nervous.

I think you're just complete unknown.

Like we're not in our comfort zone.

It's a very different setting, very different place.

We don't know how they're going to react to it.

You know, I think a lot of people here are like first time drag attendees.

So they might not know what to expect,

which could be good and bad.

You know, there's there's pros and cons to that. We’ll see.

I mean, the aim is for everyone to have a really good time.

So remember you’re doing the solo first.

Yeah. And then we’re doing dancing game.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

I'll just give terrifying.

I'm so scared.

I've never, never get scared.

So it's just.

Crazy, Alright?

Let's do this.

HELLO Oh, I'm sorry.

Let’s introduce ourselves my name is Misty Monique hold for applause.

And I am Demeanor McCall, this is.

I can see the front row.

Hi, nothing to cheer about!

It's just darkness after that we can’t see you.

Pippy Longstockings in the front.

Hello.

Can we get the lights up for a second Tom?

No! Turn them off, turn them off.

Are they still there?

Hold on, do You want to hide behind this?

Security! Oh,

security.

Oh, no.

she didn’t...

Oh, no she didn't...

Oh Yes she did!

It just really fun isn’t it Yeah, you know, they.

Just include everybody.

And we were saying sort of, if you think of Shakespeare

and all those things, it was always terribly bawdy.

Lots of audience

participation, toing and throughing, I think it was perfect for here.

I think it was absolutely perfect. Yeah, I loved it.

It was fantastic.

I hope they have more of them actually, it was really fun.

Well, I've been here many times and seen lots of different things and nothing.

Quite like This evening.

So I was really surprised to see on the listing if a Smallhythe place,

but was really excited to come and it was really good

fun and it's just lovely to have it on our doorstep and it's brilliant.

I think they should do more of it

Have you had a good time tonight? Oh,

I was invited down here back in April to look around and find out

all the history of the place and to be on this stage.

It's just incredible.

There's so much history in this.

This barn has been here

for like five hundred years we've ruined all Of that history tonight.

[Cheering] Performing at Smallhythe place was incredibly fun

and exploring the history of drag has been a real roller coaster of emotions.

And believe me, there is still so much more to explore and find out.

I'd encourage everybody to get out and see as many shows as you can.

If going to drag show has been on your bucket list for a while.

Go and watch one!

Drag is for everyone, and I personally cannot wait to welcome you to a show soon.

Lots of love huns.

My name’s been Misty Monique. Until next time.

Thank you for listening

to this episode of the National Trust Podcast.

We've reached the end of season seven, but do look out

for some special episodes between now and when season eight begins.

The best way to do that is by following or subscribing on your favourite podcast

app and sharing a special episode with a friend.

All of our past episodes and more from our mini series can be found

at nationaltrust.org.uk/podcasts.

And if you have the time, we'd love to hear from you.

You can leave a review or send a message to podcasts@nationaltrust.org.uk

We’ll be back soon with new adventures.

But until then, take care and goodbye.