"SHE'S A SEXY, VAMPY, ROCK BASTARD": TAMM REYNOLDS BRINGS MIDGITTE BARDOT TO SOUTHBANK CENTRE

On a sunny morning in March, over Zoom, Tamm Reynolds introduces me to the best drag name I have heard in years. Midgitte Bardot is Reynolds’s drag persona: a glamorous, furious creation at the centre of Shooting From Below, a new live performance work blending drag, cabaret, music and social history. This April, Reynolds brings the show to the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room, and Midgitte has a few things to say.

Photography courtesy of Holly Revell

The premise is sharp: Midgitte Bardot, famous icon and celebrity, has something to apologise for. But before she can do that, she needs to tell you why. "In order for anybody to forgive her," Reynolds explains, "she needs to tell you her entire backstory to justify whatever it is that she's apologising for. Similar to how we experience most people who are in trouble — they get a documentary made about them and then we forgive them." The knowing wink at our culture of redemption arcs is very much intentional.

That backstory spans centuries. Shooting From Below draws on the long, grim history of how people with dwarfism have been treated, from palace courts and the literal objectification in European Wunderkammer collections to cabaret stages and stag dos. The history is so shocking it barely needs embellishing, and Reynolds leans into that. "A lot of the truth of the history is quite unbelievable, and so it works to play with that."

It's a history that art historian Amanda Cachia has mapped in detail in her essay Composing Dwarfism, which traces how photography has long reduced subjects to freak, spectacle, or convenient metaphor, including nude bodies displayed for voyeuristic curiosity, circus performers shot from above by average-height photographers looking down. Cachia draws on bell hooks's concept of the oppositional gaze and critic Abigail Solomon-Godeau's inside/outside distinction to ask a pointed question: does representation of a marginalised body come from lived experience, or from the detached curiosity of an outsider? She argues that photographers like Ricardo Gil and Laura Swanson, whose work attempts to control how their bodies are seen rather than being subjected to someone else's frame, can begin to shift their disability from a site of spectacle into one that, as she puts it, “encourage[s] the compassionate involvement of the viewer, as opposed to attracting a historically prevalent morbid and reductive curiosity.” What Reynolds is doing in performance occupies the same contested ground. Shooting From Below is insider art in the fullest sense: a deliberate act of deciding, on the creator’s own terms, how to look back.

From left to right: Laura Swanson, Haircut, 2008, Ricardo Gil, Big Legs, c. 1996.

Reynolds is careful, though, not to let this become a show only about disability; it does not stop at autobiography or testimony. The show's logic extends outward: if this is how power has always treated certain people, what does that tell us about power itself? "If we're all currently feeling like the little guys," Reynolds says, "then it's happening to you too — it just looks different.”

The show has been in development since May 2023, co-written with collaborator and musician Nicol Parkinson. Reynolds is candid about the trap they were trying to avoid. "The trajectory is normally: marginalised person gets good gig, does well in the cabaret scene, then makes some kind of show about their marginalisation that gets booked and makes venues and organisers look really progressive. Then they do that show to death and burn themselves out, get put off and exploited. And then they go back to cabaret." They pause. "I can't say I've completely avoided that." 

What they've tried to do instead is use the drag persona as a pressure valve by letting Midgitte carry the darkness so that Tamm doesn't have to. "I get a bit of privilege for my visibility as well as a lot of shit — more shit than privilege — but I do get booked for things, and it means I'm able to think about how to mess with the expectation that someone's going to have of me." Add some well-crafted songs, a pop-rock-star moment or two, and a healthy dose of absurdism, and I’m entirely sold. Midgitte is, as Reynolds puts it with evident satisfaction, "a sexy, vampy, rock bastard."

Photography courtesy of Holly Revell

Reynolds is a writer first, having done their degree in creative writing at Liverpool, where they fell into cabaret and spoken word before drag entered the picture. "Writing, for me, is basically like picking a scab," they say. "I'm trying to unpick something, or it's like untangling loads of necklaces — and sometimes it's like, have I untangled the necklace, or is the thing itself the knot? And is that what's interesting?" When it comes to the audience, they've learned to trust them with that knot rather than spelling it out. "I used to make work in the hope of changing people's perspective, but I don't know how I'd measure that — it's a really silly thing to do, keep tabs on an audience. Now I trust them to put two and two together." 

The road to the Purcell Room hasn't been easy. Reynolds had major back surgery last October, losing work and income at a precarious moment, and there's a rueful honesty in how they talk about the economics: the inaccessible venues they simply can't perform in, the fees that are never quite enough. "The correct amount is never there. You're having to negotiate all the time. It's bullshit."

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Asked what it means to work as an artist in London now, Reynolds answers with a mixture of pragmatism and exasperation. “I’m very fortunate in many ways because I get asked to do lots of work,” they say. But that good fortune is sharply limited by the realities of access and survival: “There’s a lot of shows and venues and spaces I just can’t perform in because they’re inaccessible… and I can’t do multiple gigs in a weekend, let alone a week.” Nor does visibility necessarily translate into financial stability. Reynolds is especially cutting on the false prestige of institutional recognition: “Because I’ve got a show on [at] the Southbank Centre, everyone’s decided that I have loads of money… and so then you don’t get booked for other things.” What London produces, in their view, is a sort of managed scarcity: “I don’t think it’s competitive because people are competitive. I think it’s competitive because there’s fuck all opportunity out there.”

And yet, Shooting From Below is clearly the work of someone who has found a way to make their anger into something genuinely compelling: funny, formally inventive, and historically grounded. Midgitte Bardot has been gaslit to the point of combustion, and you're going to want to hear her side of the story.

Shooting From Below runs at the Southbank Centre's Purcell Room on 9, 10, and 11 April. Press night is Friday 10 April. Tickets from £12 at southbankcentre.co.uk