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A handful of businesses start in a hive of activity in the gay community of Vauxhall and end up with MPs stalling Prime Minister’s Questions to pay tax.
But the new drama inspired by the life of Paul O’Grady will mark the beginning of this unlikely journey from social worker to Lily Savage, using profanity, to national treasure in television shows about rescue dogs and Queen Camilla.
Produced with the help of O’Grady’s widower, Andre Portasio, Savage will receive his international debut at the Curve. Theater Leicester is coming up in February before it prepares to run in London’s West End.
Danny Beard, winner of RuPaul’s Pull Race UK, will play O’Grady. He also said that talking about his hero “is dangerous”.
“Paulo was especially loved in different generations and in different areas. He was truly a national treasure,” he said.
Beard said the production gives young audiences a chance to experience a time very different from what they might know. “Today, the pull has become American,” he said. “It’s four minutes of lip-syncing, polished looks and fantasy. But Lily Savage was the real deal: a singer, actress and comedian who could hold a room for an hour.”
That, said playwright Jonathan Harvey, whose credits include Beautiful, Gimme Gimme Gimme and Closer To Heaven, was one reason he wanted to bring O’Grady’s story back. “I want the younger generation to see who today’s shoulders are standing – or have been -,” he said.
Savage explores the years before O’Grady became a British radio personality, documenting his years during the Aids crisis, defying the police by protesting in gay bars (including when they all wore rubber gloves in case they got infected). At one point, O’Grady initially thought the police team was a stripper – something he thinks he quickly denied after his brief arrest.
The play also pays tribute to O’Grady’s bravery as, offstage, he regularly visited men dying of AIDS-related illnesses in the hospital, sharing cigarettes in solidarity before Aids was understood or effective medicine.
Harvey said he was very happy to have a couple of late playwrights posthumously: the chance to hear what his subject thought of the text.
“I sent Paul the first draft of the game a few months before he died and he was very happy with it,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t he?” he added, with a guffaw. “There isn’t a line of dialogue in the play that isn’t taken from one of Paul’s autobiographies.
“Paul was very fond of his voice – his first record is very long and ends when he turns 17. As a result, I was embarrassed by the wealth I was dealing with, which made writing very interesting,” he said.
After O’Grady died, Harvey put the play on hold for several months. He said: “This work that was fun was very sad. When I released it, it was still fun, but now it was about honoring a very dear person, who left us.”
The drama ends with O’Grady resigning from Savage in 2005, saying that she has traded her Blue Nun title for the rest of her life at a French convent.
However, as Harvey points out, the end of this person will not reduce the rise of the singer: by the time of his death, aged 67, O’Grady was one of the most famous broadcasters in the country, not working on the show but preparing to record a new program for Boom Radio.
