INTERVIEW: A Digital Pint with… Seiriol Davies, on How to Win Against History

Seiriol Davies is the writer, performer and composer of How to Win Against History – an award winning musical following the little known story of the 5th Marquis of Anglesey who blew his family’s colossal fortune on diamond frocks, lilac-dyed poodles, and putting on lavish plays. The show sees the Marquis, Henry, return from the dead for a fierce and ‘tragi-gorgeous’ musical to set the record extremely cross-dressingly, queerly straight. Seiriol says their mission is to make fierce, camp musicals that attack knotty political questions in a cloud of glitter – so we caught up with them for a pixelated pint to find out more about the show’s return to Edinburgh next week.

You can catch How to Win Against History from July 30th to August 24th (not the 4th, 11th, or 18th) at Udderbelly at Underbelly, George Square from 19:15 (1hr 30mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.

Jake: Hi Seiriol – your upcoming EdFringe show is described as a true story about expectations, masculinity, privilege and failure on an epic scale – tell us about the character behind the tale and what inspired you to bring it to the stage.

Seiriol: Hi Jake, thanks for the virtual pint! Mine’s dripping and a bit sticky, which I think is the sign of the best kind of slightly dodgy (virtual) pub. So How to Win Against History is a rollicking, tragi-gorgeous comedy musical about the notorious Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquis of Anglesey; an Edwardian aristocrat who blew his colossal fortune putting on fabulous plays starring himself, cross-dressed and covered in diamonds… to which very few people came. Then he toured Germany performing a dance where he was a sexy butterfly (again presumably covered in diamonds). After he died, ruined and bankrupt, at 29, his family burned every trace they could that he’d ever existed: his letters, his diaries, his photos. His eulogy said that he was so entirely ‘other’ to the sensibilities of the day that he was “incomprehensible and pathetically alone”, that nobody ever loved him and that he “lived in vain”. Ouch.

So, HTWAH imagines him returning for one night only, but don’t worry, this time he’s  not going to be weird or incomprehensible, because he’s going to tell his story in the most obvious, gettable of all art forms: musical theatre!

I grew up on Anglesey, and I used to hang out in the Paget mansion a lot, which is a National Trust property (the kind of cool, edgy stuff i used to get up to as a kid!). There, there was a huge column, statues and paintings of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Marquises (Imperial war heroes and plucky investors all), then of the 5th Marquis (our guy) there was just a laminated photocopy of a couple of pics of him that survive, along with a paragraph saying he was a silly man who wasted a bunch of money and luckily the family corrected course after he died.

So I was like 8 or something when I first saw this, and, although I hadn’t articulated my own queerness to myself and I certainly wasn’t fabulous, a little bell of recognition pounded in my chest when I looked into Henry’s lost eyes. Google image search “Henry Cyril Paget” and you’ll see: he’s like an alien David Bowie Frank Zappa icon, completely lost among the stiff, genderedness of the 1900s. Then, reading that all his correspondence and internal life had been burnt, the bell of recognition became a bell of queer rage, and then (because I believe in swift and decisive action) I decided to make a musical about it 25 years later.

And that musical is a daft, delightful cavalcade of joy: full of twatting about, wit, puns, heartache and banging bangers.

Jake: Tell us about what the audience can expect coming into the show, and what they might not expect about the show.

Seiriol: It’s a rip-roaring show: boisterous, glittering, irreverent, ferocious, daft and mega-charming; a tender story told through cabaret, music hall, a smidge of panto, disgustingly sick harmonies and keychanges and tonnes of queer joy. So you might expect it has teensy amounts of totally non-scary audience involvement, but you might not expect that the audience will be singing in German by the end. Yes, reader, ’tis the case.

Jake: What are you hoping the audience might take away from the experience, if anything?

Seiriol: Firstly, the feeling that they’ve had a hell of a good night out: to have laughed a lot and maybe cried a lil. 

And hopefully they will have connected with this story on a human level: it’s about the feeling of not fitting in in the world you’re born into, and not wanting to change who you are, but at the same time desperately not wanting the world to forget you. This is something we surely must all feel to some extent. And while yeah this is a story about a mega-privileged individual; that just means he was able to fail and make mistakes on a much bigger canvas, which is why he’s such an iconic, gorgeous mess!

But it’s also a story about queer erasure, asking what we do with the knowledge that the history we’ve always been taught is a pack of lies? History is written by the winners, and the winners ain’t often the goodies! So what about everyone else? The “facts” are gone, but we can still find deep truth and connection in what’s left. At the end of the show, there’s a rallying cry to take what’s left from the erased portions of history, the ashes and fragments, and use them to paint our own myths and legends: we have always been here, and if we refuse their mutilated “history”, refuse to feel alone and refuse to be divided; that is how we win.

But also, seriously, to reiterate, predominantly it’s one bejeezus of a fun, sparkly night out featuring high kicks and a sentient apricot.

Jake: With Edinburgh Fringe 2025 just around the corner, what are you most excited for?

Seiriol: Honestly, as a venerable Queer Elder of advanced oldth, I’m kind of looking forward to mooching and vibesing about quietly, regaling the youngs with unsolicited tales of the ancient 90s etc. But, given the fact that I grew up doing work in the category of “ultra experimental horny batshit”, I am also looking forward to looking through flyers to find the most high-concept weird production of Medea or something and absolutely loving it. Has anyone done a multi-media Medea called Multi-Medea? Surely they have. I’m there.

Jake: Given the themes of Binge Fringe, if your show was a beverage of any kind (alcoholic, non-alcoholic – be as creative as you like!), what would it be and why?

Seiriol: I think it’s like a Kir Royale or something. Like someone went “you know what this champagne needs? To be slightly thicker and taste of white raspberries”. That’s the kind of level of exuberant gaudiness that this show revels in.

A reminder, you can catch How to Win Against History from July 30th to August 24th (not the 4th, 11th, or 18th) at Udderbelly at Underbelly, George Square from 19:15 (1hr 30mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.