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5 Star Drag Cabaret Play comes to Plymouth’s Barbican Theatre
14th September 2021
Barbican Theatre, Plymouth are excited to bring the critically acclaimed Crystal Balls drag cabaret show to it’s intimate Plymouth theatre.
Drag queen and party princess Topsie (West End actor Nathan Kiely) is turning 40. She’s been studying her roots: grey roots, musical roots, and cultural roots, particularly her Traveller heritage.
She invites you to come and see bits of her you've never seen before, in a new and almost entirely truthful autobiographical show.
Not your conventional drag cabaret, the show covers themes including Gypsy Roma Traveller (GRT) rights, Section 28, and the downfall and re-elevation of Enigma codebreaker and father of Artificial Intelligence Alan Turing - but rest assured, there’s also plenty of filthy jokes, stunning vocals, and glitter!
Topsie's great grandmother was a famous psychic, Madam Olga, whose clients included the most famous and infamous individuals of wartime Britain (including Alan Turing, Lady Astor and members of the War Cabinet.). A three-hander for two performers, Crystal Balls is a fusion of cabaret and theatre, where Topsie seeks to crack the codes of her own Traveller and LGBTQIA+ history, by studying Olga’s.
In the year Alan Turing is placed on the £50 note, Boyz Award winning drag queen Topsie Redfern - otherwise known as West End Actor Nathan Kiley - is looking into the history of one one of Turing’s lesser-known associates: the fortune teller he regularly visited, Madam Olga. Who was otherwise known as Winifred Kiley: Nathan’s great grandmother. The show also explores the gay conversion therapy Turing was forced to undergo, and looks at the legality of gay conversion therapy in 2021 Britain.
This cabaret play has been created in collaboration with Amnesty Award nominated playwright and director Sarah Chew, Liszt Piano Prize winner Connor Fogel, and members of Nathan’s extended family. To research the show, Nathan had to reach out to his estranged Traveller family, and confront what it meant to be both a Traveller and a gay man.
2021 is also the year that very radical new laws are being debated in Parliament, which will curtail the rights of British Gypsy Roma Traveller (GRT) communities. Crystal Balls looks at intersections between the erasure of GRT cultures and rights, and similar erasures in LGBTQIA+ experience, in a journey of celebration of both cultures.
When the histories of your communities are missing from the history books, how do you keep those memories alive? And how do the weight of those memories affect who we are today?
Nathan says
“As a queer kid growing up in the North of England in the 80s, I actually did have a crystal ball in my attic, and I did stare into it a lot. Before I’d learned enough about the world to allow myself to embark on a journey of queer self-acceptance, I didn’t have a clue in hell what to do with my gift of shininess. Because where I was from, being shiny could get you into trouble.
“And so I’d hide in the attic, drape myself in the old stage costumes of my mother, and those of my fortune-teller great-grandmother, and stare into that crystal ball wondering why I was so different and what would become of my life”.
It didn’t take a prophet to guess that Nathan would grow up to be a drag queen: Miss Topsie Redfern. Topsie is a regular and popular fixture in some of the UK’s most celebrated cabaret venues, with regular international appearances.
Years later, as a young actor, making his West End debut as Mary Sunshine in Chicago, Nathan’s mother gave him a first night gift: the crystal ball he had been obsessed with as a kid. In his dressing room, he started to research its owner; his great-grandmother Winifred Kiely, born in 1905 to a respectable middle-class family in Bristol. Rejected by her parents after falling pregnant aged 14 to an Irish traveller more than double her age, she was forced to start her life afresh. She birthed 11 living children in a caravan 8ft wide and 12ft long, while working the fairs as the hugely renowned Madame Olga.
Sarah Chew, co-writer and director says
“We set out to research and create a show purely about Madam Olga, real name Winifred Kiely, who was born in 1903 and died in 1982. However, the journey of creating the show has in some ways altered the story we wanted to tell. GRT histories and womens’ histories have a funny habit of not getting recorded very well, and the gaps in Olga’s history have become as important a part of the story as the things we do know about her.”
Crystal Balls is the story of Nathan’s discovery of his Irish Traveller heritage, through the lens of the memories of his Great Grandmother’s extraordinary life. It uses the traditions of Irish storytelling and drag cabaret to explore the story of Winifred Kiely, and how this story intersects with the hidden histories of marginalised communities in their written and the unwritten forms: exploring the codes of silenced peoples (predominantly queer history and Traveller history) - and how those codes, from dress codes like hanky codes and garlanding, to linguistic ones like Shelta and Polari, create safety – but also build barriers.
Nathan’s work over the past few years with Drag Queen Storytime - dragqueenstorytime.com - has centred around breaking down barriers and misconceptions around feminine queer men, but this has faced several backlashes, some of them involving violent threats. Part of the creative team’s drive for making this show comes from exploring how we can take pride in the parts of ourselves - and our cultural histories – that previous generations would have hidden, and to become role models, especially to young people, safely and proudly.
So what will audiences take away from Crystal Balls? Nathan says
“The show does not shy away from addressing inequalities and challenges in both LGBTQIA+ and GET communities. But it also has some cracking songs, and a lot of laughs. We hope audiences leave uplifted, exhilarated, and hopeful that they have the power to make positive changes in the world around them.”
Crystal Balls is performed at Barbican Theatre on Friday 17 and Saturday 18 September at 7:30pm. Tickets are Pay What You Decide so bookers can pay nothing when they book and then only pay what they want to pay after they’ve experienced the show. Book tickets at barbicantheatre.co.uk/whats-on/crystal-balls/
Topsie and her Crystal Balls co-writer and director, Sarah Chew will be holding an ‘Intro To The Art Of Drag Performance’ workshop at Barbican Theatre on Thursday 16 September from 7pm - 9pm. Also a Pay What You Decide event the workshop is
open to anyone who would like to let their inner drag queen, king or prinx/ess out! (ages 18+) with an opportunity for you to share an act, or even the very start of an idea of an act, to the group (or just come along to watch or get ideas) To bo a place at the workshop visit barbicantheatre.co.uk
For more information on other Barbican Theatre performances, projects and workshop please sign up for our email updates at barbicantheatre.co.uk or follow us on social media facebook.com/barbicantheatreplymouth, twitter.com/barbicantheatre, instagram.com/barbican_theatre, youtube.com/barbicantheatreplym