Dr Adam Perchard: Bathtime For Britain

The Ironworks in central Brighton is a very welcome addition to Brighton’s arts scene, a well appointed performance space and a well run bar with plenty of space and seating too. So why have I not been more often I ask myself? And if Friday’s show is anything to go by I have certainly been missing out. Maybe it’s my indifference to a certain kind of drag, the sort inspired by Mr Ru Paul, the type where well applied make-up and a well constructed frock can often mask a lack of actual talent. That may sound harsh but here in the UK drag artistes in the main are talented singers or comedians or both. That I can admire and enjoy.

Dr Adam Perchard takes the whole form several steps forward and delivers theatre. Bathtime For Britain is a deeply moving and highly amusing look at his own life, a young life spent hiding away in the bathroom to avoid bullying and ridicule and then returning to that same childhood bathroom when the pandemic hits and an emerging career as a performer is cut short.

Dr Perchard reveals that he has abandoned a career in the groves of Academe to pursue one clad in glitter and sequins, and my god there are a lots of both as well as feathers and net. The childhood bathroom in his parent’s Jersey home was and is his creative nest, here he plays to the audience of one in the bathroom mirror, but in the pandemic he starts to film his musical creations and pretty soon they go viral, and it’s hardly surprising as they are brilliantly constructed and hilarious.

But it’s not all laughs, and the stage show is so very well balanced, shifting from camp nonsense to spine tingling ballads at the flick of an eyelash and sweep of a cloak. The man can sing too, belting out pop classics and then delivering a ballad that really show off the man’s beautiful voice, I have seldom heard a better version of Sondheim’s Being Alive!

He also includes in the show a long lost comedic art form, that of the stooge. Fin is as good as they come, equal in performance to that of Cynthia or Walter with the comic legend Hilda Baker. Fin lopes around the stage re-dressing the doctor between numbers in yet another crazy costume, wielding a leaf blower for a Kate Bush moment and appearing with all that sweet green icing flowing down for one of the maddest pop hits of all time.

Yes this is crazy good theatre, truly entertaining but also thought provoking. Dr Perchard recreates his own world of coming out and conventional gender association and rejection to great effect. The audience lap it up and rightly so, this is queer theatre at its best.

Andrew Kay

26 August

The Ironworks

Rating: