We sat down for an exclusive interview with rising Cornish playwright Brenda Callis, author of Smalltown Boy, and director, Frazer Meakin. A heartbreakingly joyful new play featuring drag artist Elliot Ditton AKA Fruit ’n Fibre in the lead role, Smalltown Boy is about grief, community, and growing up queer in a rural town, explored through the explosive storytelling medium of drag.
This show runs from 11-14th March at Pleasance Theatre – Tickets here.
What excites you about using drag not just as performance, but as a dramaturgical and movement language to explore grief and community on stage?
Frazer: Drag is rooted in and born from community. From chosen families, expression and ownership of queer spaces. it already carries a collective heartbeat. That makes it a powerful way to explore grief, which is never purely individual.
Drag also creates space to approach tricky subjects without sounding preachy. Through theatrical and, sometimes, otherworldly expression, it can say what straightforward speech sometimes cannot. Humour and ‘campness’ provide distance, allowing difficult conversations about loss, shame, or identity to land with openness rather than defensiveness.
As movement language, drag transforms the body. Heels shift balance, silhouettes reshape posture, and gesture becomes heightened and deliberate. These physical changes create a vocabulary for grief that is embodied rather than explained. Ultimately, drag invites transformation in real time; even for the characters ‘not in drag’.
But what is ‘drag’ anyway?
After developing the show over several years with deep regional support, how has making Smalltown Boy in the South West influenced its politics, aesthetics, and sense of belonging?
Frazer: Politically, developing the work in the South West grounded it in lived experience rather than abstraction. Creating the show in a region where queer visibility can feel both intimate and precarious sharpened its focus and clarified its stakes.
The landscape and pace of the South West shaped the aesthetic balance between expansiveness and intimacy. There is space (both literal and emotional) in the world of the play and in the regions and venues where we developed it. That spaciousness allowed the work to hold spectacle and stillness in equal measure.
In terms of belonging, building the piece regionally embedded it in real relationships. The show carries the imprint of the communities that supported and shaped it. It doesn’t just depict belonging; it was made through it, giving its politics and heart a lived, embodied authenticity.
Brenda: It’s been a dream to have Smalltown Boy so integrated in the South West. The theatres we are hitting on the South West leg of the tour are the places where I got to see theatre for the first time – Theatre Royal Plymouth, Exeter Northcott and Poly in Falmouth especially. We’ve received so much support from venues in Cornwall like Writers Block and Hall for Cornwall. We just did our show in Falmouth and many members of the audience said it meant a lot for the story to be from Cornwall – Cornwall is isolated and underfunded and so there isn’t a lot of capacity for home-grown stories, and we don’t often get coverage outside of postcard Rick Stein bbc documentary moments. There’s an appetite for theatre made in the South West and I’ve felt that in our support from all the theatres. What is really exciting is bringing this belonging and this energy to London – both as the ultimate city for young queers to run away to, and bringing rural stories to major stages! I’m very excited and really believe London audiences will come along for the ride.
How did you balance the show’s “big, camp, messy glory” with moments of stillness and loss, especially when directing a performer whose drag persona is so bold?
Frazer: The camp isn’t separate from the grief, it amplifies it. We leaned fully into the excess: the glamour, the chaos, the humour and spectacle when we needed to express what the stillness and words could no more. However, that gave us permission to earn the quiet. When everything drops away: the wig, the music, the punchline – the stillness feels charged rather than sentimental.
My main challenge was providing a space to pull audiences back to reality and the heart of the words when they have just been entertained and given permission to cheer, shout and be chaotic themselves. However, I thank my wonderful Lighting Designer (Hugo Dodsworth), Designer (Alice Sales) and Sound Designer (Freddie Lewis) to help with that.
Directing performers and drag was sometimes about asking: what happens when that same scale turns inward? A larger-than-life presence can make a small gesture devastating. A single breath, a held gaze, or the removal of a lash becomes monumental because of the persona’s usual expansiveness.
We treated drag not as a mask to remove for sincerity, but as the container for it. The mess and the mourning coexist. By honoring both fully and letting the show be outrageous and then radically still, the audience experiences loss not as an interruption of joy, but as part of its texture.
As the production moves from Bristol and Cornwall to London, what do you hope different audiences recognise about queer life, grief, and community that might surprise them?
Frazer: I hope audiences recognise the universal tension and tenderness between rural and city life. Community can look different in each place or by different people, shaped by visibility, scale, and proximity, yet the need for belonging is the same. Grief, love, and
family (chosen or otherwise) aren’t urban or rural experiences; they’re human ones. I hope people see how these worlds can coexist in harmony. I do hope that people are surprised by how much they see in their experiences although the characters may be living
a world or situation very different from their own.
Brenda: I think what’s been really beautiful is how many of the themes of the show feel quite universal – our audiences have been really open and willing to go on this journey with us, with a lot even having a dance at the end which always make me cry!! I think community and belonging is important to everyone, and that’s at the heart of this story. I also extending drag as a community-making tool has been so excited, and audiences have been really up for it. Drag at its most beautiful is open, accepting, challenging and joyful and that’s been how our audiences have been throughout the run too! I hope people are surprised by how much joy a show about grief can hold, because it’s been such a joy for our whole team to share it.
Edie arrives expecting rejection but finds unexpected care—what were you most interested in challenging about rural queer narratives through this reversal?
Brenda: I knew I wanted to write something about smaller towns like parts of Cornwall. Cornwall can be very isolated, both geographically and socially, and this can create ignorance, but also these pockets of very strong community. I wanted Edie to be challenged by their own assumptions of small towns, and the other characters to be challenged by what Edie, and Edie’s openness, awakens in them. People also have such a postcard view of Cornwall – it is incredibly beautiful, but also has areas of major deprivation, and parts that the rest of the UK has forgotten about. But even throughout writing this play, Cornwall has changed so much – we have Falmouth Trans Pride, queer spaces, and when we went down to Cornwall we had an afterdrag party with Kernow Drag Collective!! Which was glorious. When I turned 18 we were so upset because the one gay bar in Cornwall had just closed down, and even in the last ten years those spaces now exist, but the show still resonates and there’s still more conversations to be had! I wanted this play to be a bit of a love letter to Cornwall and these smaller towns, with the understanding that some people can stay and make a place grow, and some people just need a bigger city to find that community elsewhere, even if the place stays close to their heart.