Drag<\/a> Race UK, will play O\u2019Grady. He said that telling his hero\u2019s story \u201cfeels terrifying\u201d.<\/p>\nPaul O\u2019Grady as Lily Savage in 2012. Photograph: Graham Whitby Boot\/Allstar<\/p>\n
\u201cPaul was uniquely loved across all different age ranges and communities. He really was a national treasure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Beard said the production offered younger audiences a chance to encounter a very different era of drag to the one they might know. \u201cToday, drag has become Americanised,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s four minutes of lip-syncing, a polished look and a fantasy. But Lily Savage was the real deal: a singer, performer and comedian who could hold a room for an hour.\u201d<\/p>\n
That, said the playwright Jonathan Harvey, whose credits include Beautiful Thing, Gimme Gimme Gimme and Closer To Heaven, was one reason he was keen to bring O\u2019Grady\u2019s story back to the stage. \u201cI want the younger generation to see whose shoulders today\u2019s drag queens are standing \u2013 or sitting \u2013 on,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Savage explores the years before O\u2019Grady became a fixture of mainstream British television, charting the years he performed through the Aids crisis, openly mocking police officers during raids on gay venues (including when they all wore rubber gloves in case of contagion). During one raid, O\u2019Grady initially thought the police squad were strippers \u2013 a supposition he was swiftly disabused of when he was briefly arrested.<\/p>\n
The play also pays tribute to O\u2019Grady\u2019s bravery when, off stage, he regularly visited men dying of Aids-related illnesses in hospital, sharing cigarettes with them in solidarity before Aids was understood or effective treatments developed.<\/p>\n
Harvey said he was deeply grateful to have had something few writers of posthumous dramas enjoyed: the chance to hear what his subject thought of the script.<\/p>\n
\u201cI sent Paul the first draft of the play just a few months before he died and he was really happy with it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy wouldn\u2019t he be?\u201d he added, with a guffaw. \u201cThere\u2019s hardly a line of dialogue in the play that isn\u2019t taken from one of Paul\u2019s autobiographies.<\/p>\n
\u201cPaul really liked the sound of his own voice \u2013 his first autobiography is quite long and ends when he\u2019s just turning 17. As a result, I had this embarrassment of riches to work with, which made writing an absolute joy,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
After O\u2019Grady died, Harvey put the play away for a couple of months. \u201cThis work that had been celebratory had taken on a much sadder note,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen I brought it back out, it was still a joy, but it was now about honouring someone dearly loved, who had left us.\u201d<\/p>\n
The play ends with O\u2019Grady retiring Savage in 2005, claiming she had swapped her favourite tipple of Blue Nun for life in a French convent.<\/p>\n
Yet, as Harvey\u2019s script hints, the character\u2019s disappearance would do little to slow the performer\u2019s ascent: by the time of his death, aged 67, O\u2019Grady was one of the country\u2019s most recognisable broadcasters, working not just on this play but preparing to record a new programme for Boom Radio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Few showbusiness careers begin in a towering blond beehive in the gay pubs of Vauxhall and end with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501815,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-501814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}