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[title]‘This is awkward, but I actually hate Christmas,’ says ‘Drag Race UK’ winner and cabaret star Ginger Johnson. ‘I’d rather be at home with a bowl of pasta.’
To be honest, yes, it is somewhat awkward, given that Time Out’s art department wizards have spent all morning constructing an elaborate pyramid of brussels sprouts for her to be photographed with, against a luscious backdrop of festive red velvet.
But luckily, Ginger’s a pro. And after she fake-chomps her way through several raw sprouts for the camera, she sits down in her Soho Theatre dressing room for a chat about the trouble with Christmas. ‘It’s not really built for queer people who don’t have the kind of perfect family life or perfect relationship that all those stories are based around, y’know?’ she says. ‘As an outsider to the mainstream, it can feel like Christmas is something that’s not really made for me.’
It’s an ambivalence that the 34-year-old, County Durham-born drag star explores in her latest solo show, ‘Ginger all the Way!’ – before reclaiming the festivities with an onslaught of camp jokes, brutally honest confessions and singalongs that showcase Christmas at its very kitschiest.
‘My shows are always about something,’ says Ginger, explaining that she sets her sights a bit higher than the standard cabaret formula of songs and patter. ‘To call them issue-based makes them sound boring, but there’s usually a topic I want to explore and share with the audience.’ She’s spent much of her career working with defunct but game-changing queer nightlife collective Sink the Pink, writing and directing six surreal spins on panto tradition – while her solo shows often find her on more reflective form, whether she’s exploring her experiences living with an anxiety disorder in her 2019 Edinburgh fringe hit ‘Ginger Johnson’s Happy Place’, or the intense bond between queer people and their mums in her 2014 debut show Some Mothers.
Drag has always been about way, way more than putting on a glitzy frock and lip-syncing to Mariah. But the latest season of ‘Drag Race UK’ really showcased drag’s theatrical side, with a cast of seasoned all-round entertainers who had years of experience under their garter belts. For Johnson, that’s why the cast largely avoided the kind of Werk Room bitchiness we’ve seen in previous years: ‘You don’t have to scrap with people for attention when your work speaks for itself. And when people get over the age of 30, they just calm the fuck down a bit, y’know?’
Johnson provided so many of the season’s weirdest, most hilarious moments – from her hauntingly mournful turn as Daisy the Cow in episode five’s panto challenge, to her shambolic runway appearance in a surreal dress that swathed her whole upper body in metallic fabric, pinning her arms to her sides, and spawning endless hands-free puns from Ru Paul and Michelle Visage.
‘On the stairs up to the runway I tripped, grabbed on to my dress to steady myself, and my spiky black nails fell off,’ she explains. ‘I knew I couldn't reveal my hands with only four out of ten nails still on, so in that split second I decided to hide them and style it out.’
It was a snap decision that says so much about Ginger’s playful approach to getting dressed up. ‘Drag doesn’t have to be serious – sometimes it’s just about being a silly sausage!’ she says. ‘It’s a precarious situation to be in: you’re squeezed into a corset, wearing six pairs of tights, with a wig glued to your head, decked in jewellery no one would dream of wearing in the real world. Sometimes, it does go wrong. But part of my drag philosophy is about embracing that.’
Sometimes, it does go wrong – but part of my drag philosophy is about embracing that
In Ginger’s current show, she channels the chaotic, quixotic spirit of the late romance novelist Dame Barbara Cartland, who died in 2000 – long before Ginger donned her first nylon wig – while her fellow contestants sent up moments from ’90s sitcoms or ’00s reality telly. Why is that drag queens are so fixated on resurrecting these niche, dusty bits of pop culture and dragging them out for new audiences? ‘I feel like part of the job of a drag queen is to memorialise camp moments from history,’ says Ginger. ‘It’s important that those characters don’t get forgotten.’
Especially when, like Barbara Cartland, they’re accidental queer icons. ‘She’d only wear pink, she had all these little dogs and she pretended to be fabulously wealthy,’ Ginger says. ‘But when she died, they were emptying her stately mansion and they discovered that her great big four poster bed was just a pile of cardboard boxes with a blanket chucked over it. And that is the essence of drag.’
Ginger is a master of that kind of ingenious, drag illusion. She made all but one of her spectacular costumes for ‘Drag Race UK’, scouring Walthamstow High Street for cheap fabrics to turn into grand gowns – after all, it was her sewing talent that originally enabled her to move from the north-east to London at the start of her career, when she got a gig making costumes for performance artist Scottee. And she also manages to make taking part in an incredibly stressful, televised competition look like the easiest thing in the world.
‘It’s like the ultimate drag assault course, where you get pushed into trying all sorts of things,’ she says. ‘I honestly, absolutely did not think I was gonna win, so I just had as much fun as I could.’
After an intense few months split between filming the series and rehearsing her Soho Theatre show, Ginger might not love Christmas – but she could certainly use the break. So she’s planning to spend the day relaxing in her east London flat with her partner: ‘We’ll dress up our two cats in little bow ties, even though they’ll probably rip off their costumes in about ten minutes. Drag clearly doesn't run in the family!’
And she’ll leave it to the rest of us to enjoy London’s onslaught of feasting, festive pop-ups, pantos (she recommends the RVT’s drag spoof, Tossed!) and cabaret shows. Enforced jollity? She just doesn’t need it. ‘After all, I pretty much dress like a Christmas tree all year round,’ she laughs.
'Ginger All The Way!' is on at Soho Theatre until Saturday January 6.
Put some camp in your Christmas with these rude, raucous pantomimes.