Theatre / Musical Theatre
How To Win Against History: Seiriol Davies’ ‘disgustingly sparkly and joyful’ juggernaut is being restaged after 10 years
Nearly a decade on from its rip-roaring debut at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016, Seiriol Davies’ much acclaimed three-hander musical How To Win Against History is being restaged for 2025.
The show is a co-production from the Olivier Award-winning producers of Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder!, Fleabag and Baby Reindeer, with Bristol Old Vic, where it will be resident for a three-and-a-half-week run that opens on June 19.
Returning to the stage in the year that marks 150 years since his birth, it’s a true story that centres on the late Edwardian aristocrat Henry Cyril Paget, exploring “expectations, masculinity, privilege and failure on an epic scale”.
is needed now More than ever
Paget, the former 5th Marquis of Anglesey, lived a lavish and glamorous life, squandering his fortune while performing in his own plays – to no-one – dressed in diamonds; and transforming his car to emit rose-scented exhaust fumes.
Upon his death at only 29, he was utterly bankrupt and consigned to a footnote in history – believed to have been an embarrassment to his family.
Davies first became interested in his story as a child, when visiting Plas Newydd, the National Trust-run stately home on Anglesey formerly belonging to the Paget family.
In How to Win Against History, they allow Paget a chance to reconcile with his own lost narrative, and rewrite the pages of his story that were so inexcusably erased. “It’s about feeling desperately weird and alone,” they say. “But knowing that to fit in would cost you everything.”
The original cast return for this “disgustingly sparkly and joyful” restaging, in which Davies once more performs as Paget, alongside fellow performers Matthew Blake and Dylan Townley. In the run-up to rehearsals, they spoke with Bristol24/7 about how it feels to be donning the sequins once more.
Seiriol Davies – photo: Bristol Old Vic
The show is being restaged almost a decade after it first took the Edinburgh Fringe by storm. Does anything feel different about revisiting the production in 2025?
“Sweet Jeebus – a decade! Don’t! Thank goodness we all still look so young (don’t answer that). It feels properly amazing to be revisiting the piece and creating a new production. It feels like some of the themes that the show’s about – queerness, privilege, dealing with our imperial past – have only become more prominent in society in the years since the original production premiered.
“And that means that they’re more central in mainstream conversation, but also consequently more polarised (as happens when such things tip over from the margins and are suddenly being discussed on ITV.) So it feels incredibly ‘now’. Possibly even more ‘now’ than it was which sounds a bit Doctor Who, but you know what I mean.”
What is it like to be bringing the original cast back together for this show, after so many years?
“Returning to such a familiar show after a break, and with many new creative voices in the mix, is also a tonic. It’s great to dig into what makes the show tick, which bits have always felt amazing to perform and which bits were a bit like ‘yeah just get through this bit fast and loud, audience, cos you’re gonna LOVE the next bit!’”
While devising and developing this musical, how did you navigate the need to dazzle and delight your audience with communicating the serious and tragic undercurrents of Paget’s actual life, as well as his posthumous treatment by history?
“For me, pathos only becomes sharper when coupled with comedy. Hope, optimism, or a goofy clownish sensibility: they’re all beautiful things that can make an audience fall in love with a character. That relationship cracks open the truth that ultimately, we’re all bumbling idiots just trying to do what we think is best.
“But my favourite thing is to have an audience laughing, and then suddenly go somewhere really raw and truthful and unalloyed. It’s a way to break open that space of horribly real, hilariously sad, utterly human sad/happy empathy. Those moments when life flips completely, those are the times that stick with you; that’s when you feel most alive.
“For me personally, my way into this story was always as the chronically weird person that I am. I’ve always felt way more apart from society because I’m weird, neuro-spicy, flowery and obsessive about the oddest things.
“So I thought about Henry Paget. And, because all of the letters and diaries that would tell us what he felt and thought are gone, we simply don’t know what he was thinking. I wondered then if we could make him into a story of someone who had ‘failed’ so massively to connect with other people that his obituary explicitly stated as much: saying he’d never felt love or affection because he was so pathetically obtuse. But our version of him is perpetually trying to connect with his audience, in the most aggressively ‘gettable’ art form known to humanity: the musical; essentially asking them: ‘HEY WHAT IF THERE WERE MORE SPANGLES AND DANCING – WOULD YOU LIKE ME THEN?’”
“The opening song is called Mainstream! as Paget and his compatriots set out the stall of the show: don’t worry, this will not be weird! You will have a good time! And hopefully that’s simultaneously reassuring to an audience (I grew up in the middle of nowhere: it’s a big commitment to come out to the theatre, and gosh dangit, if someone makes it to a show, I want to give them a good time!) but it’s also setting up what the show is about for me: how do you integrate and ‘win’ in a world that simply doesn’t understand you? Is it better to (try to) change yourself and fit in, or plough your own furrow and risk just being an outsider that nobody remembers?”
How are you feeling about the prospect of a three-and-a-half week run at Bristol Old Vic?
“I’m incredibly excited about it! I’ve only ever performed one offs or very short stints in Bristol, so I’ve not got to know it yet, and I can’t wait to settle into it a bit more. I’ve got friends and family that live there, so that will be lovely as well. And of course, Bristol people are legendary, and I can’t wait to welcome hopefully lots of you to the gaudy little box of demented queer joy that is How to Win Against History!”
Finally, if Paget were to see the show, how do you think he might respond to it?
“Well, realistically, he’d be appalled that we don’t have a costume budget in the multiple millions, given that he once commissioned a jacket made of emeralds purely to play ping pong in, and his costume for his production of Aladdin cost more than the family mansion (and he was only in one scene). However, on the human side, the boring answer is we simply don’t know: because queer erasure (see above), we do not know much of how he thought or felt at all. We only know him through second-hand fabulosity.
“But, obviously, I’d like to think he’d vibe with what we’re doing, even though not all of it is entirely what you’d call ‘kitchen sink realism’. But the humanity is deep. We’ve had members of the Paget dynasty come to see How to Win… and love it too. It really feels like his story is able to be at peace now, which is a beautiful thing. Even if the bitter truth is I’m sure he’d have preferred to tell it himself.”
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How To Win Against History is at Bristol Old Vic from June 19-July 12 at 7.30pm, with additional 2.30pm matinee shows on Thursday and Saturday (no shows on Sunday). Tickets are available at www.bristololdvic.org.uk.
Main photo: Feast Creative
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