The Vivienne – first winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK – has a new mission in life onstage – “I want to evoke nightmares,” she tells me as she is about to bring the villainous Child Catcher to Eastbourne in the UK tour of musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Her drag name derives from her lifelong love of the clothes of Vivienne Westwood – but we’ll come to that later.
Her mother enrolled her in what she says was a rather scary Saturday afternoon drama class in the local church hall, with goths and at age 10 she was doing the Time Warp.
Moving from North Wales to Liverpool, The Vivienne was quickly into gay bars and the drag scene as well as being a DJ. “In drag, you become who you really are – a heightened more confident version of yourself. The Vivienne thinks she’s classy, but she’s not that classy.” Her role models were strong women – like her nan, Disney villains, Cher and Meryl Streep.
“These women are untouchable – I’ve taken bits of their chutzpah.”
She recalls taking the train to Manchester and buying her first pair of Westwood pirate boots. “I fell in love with Vivienne Westwood when I was 14, the whole anarchy of it all appealed as boys had only clothes from Burton’s Menswear.”
And the love has not diminished – The Vivienne owns Pete Burns’ last stage dress.
Fast forward to 2015, and The Vivienne is one of 21 drag queens picked to appear in RuPaul’s Drag Race UK Ambassador – a precursor to the launch of Drag Race UK several years later. She won it but still had to audition for Drag Race UK when it came along in 2019, and she won again. “It helped my career, being associated initially with the brand.”
Asked abut the famed bitchiness among contestants, she told me: “you put 12 drag queens on the TV box, there’s bound to be bitchiness – it’s like any workplace, but of course we’re good at put-downs.”
And then there was Dancing On Ice: “I loved it, every moment of it; it stretched creative muscles I didn’t know I had. It took my art and talent to a different audience – a prime time TV one. I’ve never felt more loved by the public. I’d do it again tomorrow if there’s an all stars version.”
And so onwards to The Vivienne’s villain period. She was surely a natural to play the Wicked Witch of The West. “I never approached it as a drag role, and it’s not panto villainy. I was shitting myself – I’d never done a musical and this one was by Andrew Lloyd Webber.”
“I love to do things that scare me and this was my proudest achievement.”
And so on to more villainy – the current tour of Chitty and the role of the Child Catcher, made famous on film by dancer Robert Helpmann.
“I’m not playing it as a female character, and there’s no prosthetic nose. At performance plenty of children are crying: I want to evoke nightmares. I want to stay true to what people know and love but with my own spin. Being a villain is fun: I don’t want to be helping people,” she joked.
“He lures children with free sweets so I’ve given him rotten teeth from eating too much of the sweets he gives away. The production team have let me have creative input.”
What’s next I wondered? “I’ve got a script on my desk – can’t say what. If it takes off, it’s going to be huge – the story of an absolute legend. It’ll be quite a moment. And I’ve got some TV shows coming up, but I can’t talk about them either.”
As she came out to her parents at 14, I wondered what advice she’d give to her teenage self. “Just do everything but leave the drugs behind. You’ll do everything right. I’m still doing everything I thought I couldn’t do.”
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is at Eastbourne’s Congress Theatre from November 19- 24. Tickets HERE
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