Focus on: Ada Campe

"She’s a throwback to what we imagine a mid-century variety artiste may have been like, but without the casual sexism, racism and homophobia," says performer Naomi Paxton of her comedy creation Ada Campe.

"She’s good fun. She does comedy, variety and magic, and she really likes to play and communicate with the audience." Ada’s new show—her second at the Fringe—is performed with the "psychic duck" of the title, a prop which leads us through the character’s early life in variety, and some of the influential women she’s met.

"It’s about Ada’s life as a teenager and how she came across the duck," says Paxton. "The subtext is that we all wonder what might have been sometimes, we feel the sliding doors moment and find people who become inspirations. Maybe you don’t build lifelong relationships with them, but these flashpoint moments turn your head and put you on a different path. I’m also a theatre historian in my other life, though, so I love the silly characterness of Ada, and the hark back to an old-school idea of what variety is."

Trained at Goldsmiths in London and the former Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, the London-based Paxton worked as an actor for a decade. She only discovered the contribution of theatre performers to the suffrage movement while working in the West End. "I’d never done the suffragettes at school," she says. "I’d done the Tudors, then changed schools and done the Tudors some more. It was a revelation, I just loved the fact there was all this activism in the theatre, and these plays were really funny."

With some funding help from Equity, she studied a PhD at the University of Manchester from 2011. Since then, she’s written books on the Actresses’ Franchise League, as it was known, and appeared on BBC Radio 3. The timetable of an academic means she’s had to leave the full-time actor’s life and instead scratch the performance itch with Ada’s one-woman show over the past seven years.

"Ada does not talk about suffrage theatre," Paxton confirms, "but I love performing and the power of theatre, and there’s something so special about sharing moments in that space. When I look at the energy of suffrage theatre, they didn’t do all-female Shakespeare or anything, they wrote new work that had all these fun female characters in them.

"I guess this is an old-fashioned variety act," she continues, "but not in a staid, ‘oh bless ‘er’ kind of way. People often introduce Ada as a music hall act, but she’s got Instagram, she’s not from the Victorian era! It’s just a bit of nonsensical harking back. Mat Ricardo [whose show Paxton is also appearing in] said in an intro the other day that Ada puts the ‘she’ in shenanigans… I thought, ‘that’s really nice, can I put it on my flyers please?’."