This queer, non-binary cabaret star turned their lockdown experience into a personal triumph of virality and is now on the road to meet the people – including a show in Aberystwyth. Bathtime For Britain is a “big party show” with a bathroom theme. Curious? Let Dr. Adam Perchard and Buzz’s Hannah Collins explain more…

“We’re just a couple of rooms away from that iconic bathroom,” Dr. Adam Perchard tells me excitedly, large elaborate earrings jangling around a beard and what looks to be a pint of Berocca in hand. The bathroom in question is in their parent’s Jersey home, where Adam intermittently lives when they aren’t in London. It’s significant to our conversation as it became the performer’s respite during lockdown – a private performance space in lieu of any gigs – and, as a direct result of those performances being shared online and Adam becoming something of a viral star on the island and beyond, forms the basis of their currently touring show, Dr. Adam Perchard’s Bathtime For Britain.

As a performer – and a human being, frankly – Adam’s list of accomplishments is exhausting: singer, comedian, playwright, poet, trained opera singer and even a PhD in post-colonial literature. Did I miss anything? “I make quite a good salad dressing as well.”

Though Adam, who identifies as non-binary, plays with gender in their costuming, they wouldn’t quite describe their art form as drag – though they take no issue with being put in that category, nor appearing on drag bills. Cabaret is probably a better fit, though how can really try to put someone in a box who commissions their seamstress mother to make them costumes blending Mr. Darcy with a WWII sea mine?

The answer is to get Adam to, which they do with the kind of poetic eloquence you’d expect from someone with their CV: “It’s a kind of joyful eruption,” they say of Bathtime For Britain. “It’s what happens when you put a cabaret performer in a bathroom for 18 months and eventually, the doors blow off. First and foremost, it’s a big party show – I say it’s a coming out party because we’re all coming out of lockdown together but beyond that, they’re some very heartfelt moments in it: I came out to myself [as non-binary] in the bathroom. By the end, when we get to the Purple Rain encore, it just feels like we’ve been on this gorgeous journey together.”

On the back of this, I’m curious about why bathrooms attract performers like Adam – the privacy, the good acoustics, the vulnerability of being undressed? “A bit of all that,” they ponder, confirming that when they moved back home to Jersey at the start of lockdown, the reverb was what first lured them to the room but soon also found it “an intensely private space for dreaming. I’m not the only bathroom baritone. Many of us go and live our rockstar fantasies [in there], but these are really contemplative spaces. It’s an interesting mix of functionality and fantasy – where we go to do our most primitive and animal things. But also where we go to escape into this world of steam and dreams.”

We then move on to unpacking the paradoxical experience that lockdown was for so many: contextually dystopian but also a time to look inwards, a time to heal the psyche even while rolling news reported mounting body counts. Adam’s show reflects those dark times but amidst that darkness, they say, is a sense of regeneration, getting back in touch with who we are and who we want to be. “Moving back to be with my parents was really important and gave me the space to gather myself and go after it.” Without wanting to intrude too much on the potential trauma of growing up as a queer person within a small community, I suggest to Adam that their upbringing must have been positive enough for them to feel comfortable returning home.

“You put your finger on a nub,” Adam smiles. “I actually grew up in India until I was 15 but when I moved back to Jersey, I had a complicated relationship with it as a teenager. I talk in the show about how my childhood bathroom was a refuge for me. Because I was lucky, I had gay friends and plenty of straight friends who were okay with me. But I’d also be spat at in the street and called f****t and punched sometimes. And I used to come home, sing into the bathroom mirror and imagine there was an audience that loved me. I would live my Judy Garland fantasy. And when I came back to Jersey all these years later, I discovered it was still a place of safety from the darkness of the world.

“I’ve been really embraced by Jersey now and that was part of the show – making these videos over lockdown and people here started getting into them and I got this lovely following on the island. People would request songs and message me every day so it became this community endeavour. Then the Jersey Art Centre saw and said ‘this has got to be a live show, come into the theatre and we’ll give you a rehearsal space.’ They’ve been amazing. And, you know, I’ve hosted Jersey Pride this year where there were so many baby queers, but also straight allies. It was a real moment to see how far this part of the world had come.”

I end up scratching on another sensitive nub when I ask how someone with so many strings to their bow managed to find a focus in life. Adam admits it was “paralysing” for a long time, recounting their shift into full-time academia causing them to have a nervous breakdown. But, much like our discussion of the dual nature of lockdown, this became a blessing in disguise: “Weirdly, it was just what my body needed. That’s when I went back to performing full time and that was the right thing. It’s felt like a lot of these things have been drifting closer and closer together and, for me now, I live in the centre of that bananas Venn diagram.”

Proof of this comes from Adam’s recent show Ballads From Bunker Island, which explores Jersey’s history of slavery as recently as WWII when the island became Nazi-occupied, as well as The Thirteenth Fish, about its Neolithic history and folktales, but also the possibility of reclaiming Jersey as a queer space. What does representing all that entail, you might ask? Ritual magic and song around some standing stones (Faldouet Dolmen) in an outfit made of seven wedding dresses.

By now, you may have picked up on Adam’s unusual wardrobe choices, and I’m keen to know where their fashion inspiration comes from. “I’m a crafty queen,” they explain, citing a passion for bubble wrap and other cheap-as-chips materials you could pick up in your local B&Q. I suggest they’d do well at the famed ‘Drag On A Dime’ challenges in RuPaul’s Drag Race. Though Adam takes the compliment, they don’t think the drag reality competition show would be the best place for them.

Despite having performed alongside the likes of Bianca Del Rio, Adore Delano and Courtney Act, they’re less interested in the gendered illusion of drag and more in a wide palette of influences, ranging from the beautiful fabrics and more feminine male clothing of their childhood in India to operas like Madam Butterfly and Tosca, to… whatever enters their brain at any given moment. “More than male or female, I’ve always felt slightly supernatural. I spent a lot of my childhood either dressed as Elizabeth I or a wizard. These costumes just pour out of my heart. And there are a lot of historical references but also a sci-fi vibe as well.”

Bathtime For Britain’s signature look is the toilet roll wig, which I tell Adam reminds me of Lady Gaga’s iconic diet coke can hair rollers from the Telephone video. What Adam was actually going for wasn’t a women’s prison DIY beauty moment but an 18th-century baroque wig, emphasising the double-ness of the show’s title: Britain needing a good old scrub. During lockdown, they remind me, toilet paper was also “at the centre of the national drama for a while. ‘Have you got enough? Who’s got them all? What are people doing with them? Well, one person’s making them into a massive 18th-century wig…’ I’m sure everyone across the nation would have been very relieved if they knew that’s where the excess ones were going!”

Despite the setting and materials that go into Adam’s show, they still deploy the diva-ish behaviour you’d expect from someone performing Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey numbers. The brunt of this falls onto their weary stage assistant Fig, who is always on ‘wafting’ duties during costume changes into airier outfits. Attendees can also expect stalwart sing-along numbers from David Bowie, Kate Bush and Prince at Bathtime For Britain, which Adam says makes it a “beautiful coming together” across demographic lines. “It’s wonderful looking out from the stage and seeing a 60-year-old-looking white guy getting down with some genderfluid youth next to him. It’s actually really wholesome.’

Though Adam’s ambition and extravagance sound as though they’d thrives in any environment from bathroom to stage – and in any outfit from bubblewrap to toilet roll – I’m curious to know what they’d do with an unlimited budget, time and resources. Their eyes lighting up with possibility, they eventually settle on a song and dance show encapsulating the history of the British Isles with them suspended above a modest cast of 3,000 people dressed as Queen Elizabeth I. Anyone have a chequebook handy?

Dr. Adam Perchard’s Bathtime For Britain, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Fri 11 Nov.

Tickets: £10-£15. Info: here.

words HANNAH COLLINS