Scarlett Stitt is going to intrude
Co-organiser of Haus of Intrusive Thots, Scarlett describes their love of getting ready, the push and pull between acting and drag and creating a safe cabaret club night community.
I've been acting since I was eleven. I was a really shy child, but got into the school play, and my parents decided to put me in acting classes. I ended up getting an audition for Horrid Henry and booked it! I was moody Margaret in Horrid Henry the Movie... As an adult I trained at RADA and was lucky enough to go to Lecoq in Paris for a course one summer. That changed my perception of what I could do. It was all about expanding the body and finding yourself through animals, elements and imagination. It was so expansive and completely blew my mind.
My epiphany moment though was when I saw Lucy McCormick. I was obsessed with her energy and level of performance. It was so different from any of the acting I'd been doing up until then and I loved how she mixed different performance mediums together. I’m obsessed with Bullyache for similar reasons. I went on to do the Drag Lab at Soho Theatre. The drag community is brilliant because you can meet your heroes whereas acting by contrast is so stush. It’s ironic really because the drag community so often feeds the acting world. These big industries borrow from queer culture all the time! I love the drag and performance world because it moves the conversation forward by always challenging and disrupting the way in which we tell stories and constantly pushing against set boundaries.
That’s how I ended up creating Haus of Intrusive Thots. It was made up from some of us who met at the Soho Drag Lab. We all have different skills, so we can put stuff on in a really friendly, chill way. There’s Ella, who is Placenta of Attention and also a mad star musician; Holly, who's an actor, but is also incredibly visual and makes amazing graphics for all of our posts, and Saffia who performs as Kieth Lorraine and is our producer. We all collaborate and help each other out on our individual projects too. I’m directing Holly’s show Big Little Sister at the Fringe this year!
We also go to shows as much as we like to put them on. There’s this mutually supportive thing where we're able to bring guests in, make it a community and branch out with who we put in our shows. For example, I did an eight week act development with Evelyn Carnate at the Soho School of Burlesque and Evelyn then performed at Thots, which was amazing, since she’s my and the burlesque mother! So Thots is not just drag (though that’s such an expansive genre in itself) but also clowning, burlesque and performance art. It’s entirely hybrid. Nurturing that wider community with a sense of support and safety right now feels so important too, because it's so under threat. With everything that's happening in the country and the direct attacks to the trans community and healthcare it’s a really difficult time.
How I start my day depends on what I'm performing. For Thots I always wake up and text the group: “It's show day! Yay!” and everyone's really excited. Then I have a really chill morning. I try to eat loads, because I'm not gonna be able to eat later.
One of my favourite parts of Thots is getting ready together. We arrive like four or five hours before, and everyone does their makeup and chats shit for ages. You've got Keith Lorraine drag kinging out; Joyce doing incredible wig stuff and gluing together lashes made out of cardboard; or Ralph, who is very intricate and theatrical in his make up, he'll use real hair or if it's Halloween, actual moss on his face and costume. We always leave ourselves so much time to get ready and set up, and yet somehow we always run out of time...
If I'm acting in a play or a film, the preparation is quite different. I've got to do at least a meditation, a vocal warm up and a physical warm up. That's the minimum. For something like Kissing a Fool warming up was super important because it was one of the most physically exhausting things I’ve ever done. We [Dylan Aiello and Scarlett Stitt] designed this really intricate score and every movement was strictly choreographed to the second. It taught me so much about how detailed you can be and how powerful that is. This year I’m acting in a show written by Mojola Akinyemi called Cara And Kelly Are Best Friends Forever For Life at Edinburgh Firnge, which I expect will demand similar things from me in terms of performance. It’s a two-hander so there’s nowhere to hide!
For Thots we hadn’t originally thought about doing a late night slot. We approached The Yard Theatre telling them we'd love to do our show there, it was our dream venue. And they were like, okay, we can offer you a club night. So Halloween last year we did our first one there and it was honestly crazy! We were at full capacity. None of us expected it to pop off like that.
When I’m performing I feel free. In my daily life I’ve had quite a lot of instances where people feel I’m too much, whether that’s talking about politics or being too loud or uncool. When I'm on stage, it feels like I'm not too much anymore because I’m playing a character. I've got permission to really be true to myself in a way that I don't find in daily life. I think that's why people come and see drag and live performances too. Maybe they leave feeling empowered or part of a collective: suddenly they're not alone in their feelings.
At Thots, the boundaries between acts and audience are blurred. The performers enter and exit from the back, through the crowd, like they’re parting the Red Sea. I think there's definitely an equality there that you don't get with a traditional theatre setting. In theatre there’s such a clear boundary between actors and audience who have to be quiet and civilised. With Thots the acts are constantly mixing with the audience. It’s hilarious when someone like Ezme Pump comes out in a massive flowing red robe and then you find her dancing or chatting in the smoking area.
I want the audience to feel constantly surprised at Thots. Like, I've just seen a ventriloquist seal do a performance trick on Lachlan Werner’s arm, and now I'm watching a Heroes chocolate box do a strip tease. What is going on?! And it’s not just the acts that I want to surprise people with, I’m also always trying to think about how we can change people's perceptions of drag in general. How can we put drag in spaces that people don't expect and in front of people who don’t usually see this? Like, would you expect to see Ella the Great in an art gallery context? What happens if you do?
The self care aspect both during and after a show is definitely important for me. Especially if you're doing a club scenario because those can be hard spaces. But to be honest, when I was clubbing before, it was completely different to this. After my sobriety, I decided I wanted to create a space that was fun and safe for people that are sober and that I would have loved to be in when I was younger. The way we pick the acts and curate the night all feeds into those ideas a fun and safe community too. I feel like we need more supportive spaces like that in the queer community. And to be honest in the straight world too!
At Thots, once you finish your act you have to stay till the end. Which is actually really fun because the night ends with us all dancing to music from the incredible Unicorn Baby Slay, a DJ trio from Brighton. I almost wish I could do that after an acting performance too, because you can just vibe it out and continue this energy since you're always on such a performance high. So for Thots we’ll perform, dance, pack down, pack up, and eventually make our way home. At that time there's never any trains from Hackney Wick, so you have to get at least two buses, take two hours, and you’ll get in at five in the morning in full drag, exhausted. But it feels amazing.
Once I’m home it takes about three goes to get all of my makeup off and even then there's always glitter left on my body. I often don't take a shower. I'm like, fuck it, and just get into bed. I re-watch a lot of TV, and films. If I'm feeling like I need comfort, I’ll re watch Girls. I literally re watch that show every six months when I'm sad. That's my go to relaxing vibe.
In general, the way I think about my drag - like the responsibility I have as a professional actor - is that I have all this stuff that I carry within me; all of the good, the bad, the weird. It’s all part of me, and if I can be brave and use it, that will empower people to be brave in their real lives too.
Catch the Haus of Intrusive Thots next at xyz gallery on 3rd May and follow them on instagram for future events 👀
Scarlett is also acting in Cara and Kelly are Best Friends Forever For Life, by Mojola Akinyemi, at the Edinburgh Fringe. Get tickets here.
Finally catch Holly Giffords’s show Big Little Sister directed by Scarlett Stitt, also at the Edinburgh Fringe, Zoo Venues at 10.35am.
We saw what you did in the dark:
Jin Hao Li Swimming in a Submarine
Jin Hao Li’s Swimming in a Submarine is a fascinating hour of surreal, odd, and oftentimes awkward stand up comedy. He begins the show by greeting everyone as they walk in the door. He’s warm with the audience, grateful, almost embarrassed that we’ve come to see him. Eventually he follows us into the theatre, asking us how we’re doing as we get comfortable. Modestly, he introduces himself from backstage, and the show begins.
Jin is attempting something difficult in a stand up show: he mixes crowd work with storytelling, dreams, classic jokes, various personas, and, frankly, some lies. The audience gets lost in the true and untrue, in his variety of personas, in the constant deviations to interact with the crowd. We begin to wonder how much of this was planned, how much of this is Jin “playing” (his words for his improvisations), and how much of this we are meant to question at all.
The night we saw him, Jin even commented that the show is turning into “performance art.” Though he meant it as a joke, it has a twinge of truth. This is really a stand up show like no other. Tension rises and falls, and it’s thrilling. Yet we never feel unsafe, as Jin always acknowledges the ebbs and flows and masterfully guides us back to the more conventional bits of the show when we’ve had enough.
It’s an extremely brave performance, one that has the potential to genuinely fail if handled by a less skilled comedian. Yet Jin pushes the audience to engage with him, to follow his seemingly random trails of thought, to test the limits of how “weird” a show can be while still being hilarious.
Having finally seen the show, we understand the mass flock to see it in Edinburgh, the much extended Soho run, and we can’t wait for all that’s to follow.