Savage, a play about Paul O’Grady’s rise to national treasure, to premiere in February

Paul O'Grady with a Chinese crested dog called Cindy in Paul O'Grady's For the Love of Dogs in 2022. Photograph: ITV/RICHARD LEA-HAIR/REX/Shutterstock View image in fullscreen Paul O'Grady with a Chinese crested dog called Cindy in Paul O'Grady's For the Love of Dogs in 2022. Photograph: ITV/RICHARD LEA-HAIR/REX/Shutterstock Savage, a play about Paul O’Grady’s rise to national treasure, to premiere in February RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Danny Beard to step into Lily Savage’s heels in Jonathan Harvey’s play Few showbusiness careers begin in a towering blond beehive in the gay pubs of Vauxhall and end with MPs pausing prime minister’s questions to pay tribute. But a new play inspired by the life of Paul O’Grady will chart the beginning of that unlikely journey from care worker to Lily Savage, with her dextrous use of expletives, to national treasure presenting heartwarming teatime TV shows about rescue dogs with Queen Camilla. Developed with the support of O’Grady’s widower, Andre Portasio, Savage will receive its world premiere at Curve Theatre Leicester next February before a planned run in London’s West End. Danny Beard, a winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, will play O’Grady. He said that telling his hero’s story “feels terrifying”. View image in fullscreen Paul O’Grady as Lily Savage in 2012. Photograph: Graham Whitby Boot/Allstar “Paul was uniquely loved across all different age ranges and communities. He really was a national treasure,” he said. Beard said the production offered younger audiences a chance to encounter a very different era of drag to the one they might know. “Today, drag has become Americanised,” he said. “It’s 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.” 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’Grady’s story back to the stage. “I want the younger generation to see whose shoulders today’s drag queens are standing – or sitting – on,” he said. Savage explores the years before O’Grady 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’Grady initially thought the police squad were strippers – a supposition he was swiftly disabused of when he was briefly arrested. The play also pays tribute to O’Grady’s 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. 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. “I sent Paul the first draft of the play just a fe