LONDON
January 18, 2025

STRANGER: Naomi Paxton
LOCATION: Dulce Coffee & Kitchen, 86 Whitechapel High Street, London, England
THEME: Brunch with an academic, magician and performer who’s always on the move

Naomi Paxton wears many hats.

The most obvious are the literal hats — the colorful ones, often twice the size of her face, that she wears when performing her playful, funny, magical cabaret act “Ada Campe.” They are explosions of feathers, hues and jewels that hearken back to the era of music halls with a modern spin.

There’s the acting hat she wears when working front and back of house, in shows large and small, throughout London and beyond.

There’s the professional academic hat — she’s an expert on British suffragettes, with a particular focus on how stage plays helped the campaign to give women the vote.

Then there’s the public engagement hat she wore working with Romanian orphans, many of them non-verbal, teaching them drama by using puppetry and other tools of the trade.

Naomi has traveled enough life paths to divide between several people. As I’ll learn during a fun hour at brunch, she has the energy to handle it all and more. She’s always on the move, it’s not just hard to pin down her career, but also where she is on any given day.

I’m interviewing Naomi on a chilly Saturday morning in London’s East End. She picked Dulce Coffee & Kitchen, a small, bustling spot on Whitechapel High Street. It was close to my hotel and offers several options for pancakes, which are always high on her list.

With so many strands to Naomi’s life, it’s hard to know where to start, but she cheerfully kicks us off by bringing up Ada Campe. “I’m going to have a long day,” she says as we meet. “I’m emceeing as Ada tonight, and I just finished a pantomime as Ada last Thursday, and the next day I was doing a talk at the National Army Museum about votes for women in World War I, then that night I was on Radio 4. So the year started in a good way. A slightly chaotic mashup, but fun.”

Her alter ego is a variety artiste, cabaret performer, comedian and magician with a joyful style who has entertained audiences of all ages and scooped up awards and plenty of praise. As Ada, Naomi makes up her face with blue, green and black accents that seem to extend her eyebrows to the top of her head, always with feathery hats and flourishes to match. Naomi’s natural speaking voice is light and very easy on the ears, but she lowers it into a huskier growl when she’s on stage as Ada.

At brunch, the difference in appearance is astonishing. Naomi’s blonde hair is cut very short when we meet, and she’s wearing all black save for a beautiful multicolored necklace and no exaggerated makeup. The combined effect of Ada’s trademark look and stage voice transform Naomi into another person, and audiences get lost in the act.

“I wanted Ada to look to feel quite timeless and old-school, but I didn’t want her to be like, ‘Oh, I am here from the Victorian era’ – no, she is in the now, but it’s the folk memory of twentieth century variety, without the casual racism, sexism and homophobia,” she says. “So I want to give all the best bits of that, the joyfulness, the silliness, the playfulness, the interaction, but also make it feel inclusive and fun and not punch down or make assumptions about things.”

The idea for Ada came about several years ago when she was working in London on the blockbuster musical “The Producers.” One of her colleagues was performing a late-night magic show as Malcolm Marvell the Master of Mystery at a small theater by Piccadilly Circus. He normally had a female assistant on stage, but the woman had left the show, so Naomi stepped up that evening to perform as the Lovely Rita. She was all talk and audience misdirection while Malcolm silently sawed her in half and made boxes disappear.

They performed the show for a few years, including at the annual Edinburgh Festival. One day, Naomi met the owner of a feminist production company who urged her to take the Rita character and turn it into a solo cabaret as a new character. Ada was born.

“It was terrifying, but I wanted to try,” she says. Ada’s first hat was made by her friend Andrew Fisher, who also made all the subsequent colorful, oversize head toppers.

“With Ada, her story is a fantastical space, and dressing like that, doing the makeup like that, wearing those wigs and those hats, it’s freeing me up,” she says. “It creates a very obvious artificiality that invites people into play. The audience don’t know what to expect, and that gives me, for a few seconds hopefully, a space in which I can play with them.”

Naomi enjoyed the first few gigs but says Ada “was just sort of drifting around the edge” of her life for a few years. Then she started researching the role of theater in the suffragette movement as part of a PhD at the University of Manchester’s drama department, where she learned about people having agency and writing their own material. “The more I looked at this, the more I felt more confident in myself and wanted to tentatively take Ada forward,” she says.

She won the 2018 Hackney Empire New Act of the Year Show and the Leicester Square Theatre Old Comedian of the Year. “Guess how old you had to be to enter the Old Comedian of the Year? Thirty-five,” she laughs.

Rave reviews followed, and she played to crowds at the Edinburgh Festival in 2019, 2022, 2023 and 2024. She continues to refine the act to this day, recently adding more singing.

“I want to see what she can do, where she can sustain and see what she’s capable of,” she says.
“I feel like she’s entering a different phase now. I like her such a lot and I don’t want to hold her back. I’m worried that I’m going to hold her back through lack of confidence. I’m still not confident singing, but I’m confident with Ada singing. Make sense of that,” Naomi says.

“I speak about her in the third person because she is so different to me, and people relate to her so differently. It’s not just me with a funny hat, it really does feel like she is a separate being,” she adds. “I don’t want to hold her back and I want her to win. However, I don’t know what that winning would look like, apart from more work and more opportunities to collaborate and more opportunities to be playful.”

The pancakes arrive for Naomi, served with fruit and maple syrup. She’s drinking a carrot juice and double espresso. “Oh my goodness, look at this,” she says, delighted, pausing to take a picture of the plate. “I’m going to send this to my wife.”

I’ve chosen the eggs benedict with an orange juice and Americano coffee — a hearty breakfast, if not the most flavorful version I’ve had.

While we eat, I ask how Naomi handles the unpredictable schedule of a performer, especially given her work in academia.

She started her PhD in 2011 and completed her doctoral research four years later. She focused on the Actresses’ Franchise League and how theater professionals contributed to the suffrage campaign. From 2015 to 2023 she had several part-time academic jobs, including as cultural engagement fellow for the University of London’s School of Advanced Study and a post-doctoral research associate for the University of Manchester’s Poor Theatres project.

“There hasn’t really been a system, to be honest with you. I’ve never had a full-time nine-to-five. My only experience having a nine-to-five was when I was working part-time as an academic,” she says. “Before academia, I was an actor and doing all these different jobs.”

Born in Lincoln and raised in Surrey, Naomi went to Goldsmiths, University of London, for a three-year drama degree. “I didn’t like my course, and it made me angry, and it made me go out and look for other things,” she explains. She got her start working in various positions for theaters, networking and hustling to establish a career.

After graduating, Naomi was eager to have formal drama school training (the Goldsmiths degree was most certainty not that, she notes). She went to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow – now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland – and finished a master’s degree in drama and acting. “I always had a drive for acting,” she says.

That drive had early sources. Her mother was a dancer and would take her to dance shows, theater and drama camp. At one of those events, seven-year-old Naomi was given a joke about Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to read out on stage, and she loved the laughter from the audience.

She recalls going to a pantomime as a child and being called up on stage and seeing how much makeup the actors had on, and feeling like she’d entered a “secret world. I felt thrilled by that private knowledge, it felt like a place where you could escape being you.”

It’s through the theater that Naomi developed her interest in the British suffragette movement to give women the right to vote, which started in the Victorian era and succeeded through Parliament passing the relevant laws in 1918 and 1928.

Around 2007, she played a character in a West End production who had only six lines, giving her plenty of downtime to read. She picked up a book featuring suffragette plays from the movement, and she was immediately hooked. “They were doing such radical, brilliant, fun, creative things, and I just loved that energy,” she says. “I loved the comedy, boldness, and sense of agency in the plays. These people were using their powers for good, doing it in such a creative way.”

Naomi would invite friends into her dressing room to read the plays, and this led to exploring the idea of staging them, starting with three one-act plays at the Union Theatre in south London. “We nearly sold out the whole run, people were so intrigued,” she says.

From there the interest and research into the suffragettes snowballed, and it has remained a constant passion. She’s published multiple works on the suffragette movement, including “The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays” in 2013, the monograph “Stage Rights! The Actresses’ Franchise League, Activism and Politics 1908-1958” in 2018, and several articles, book chapters and more.

“I’m lucky to find things that I’m genuinely passionate about,” she says. “Ada isn’t really connected to my suffragette [work], she’s not an outlet for that, but I love that energy. I love that playfulness and that’s all inside of myself, trying to use your powers for good.”

She’s done that in more than one way. She retains a vivid memory of working as a drama teacher at orphanages in Romania, spending several summers there learning how to use puppetry and other performance styles to engage with the children, many of whom were non-verbal.

“These kids were in a really fucked-up system and I was trying to find a way to do drama in a way that was meaningful for them,” Naomi says. “It was about, how can we facilitate play in these fraught circumstances and how can we have conversations about imagination and agency in a place where we have so little in common but ourselves?”

Finding agency appears to be a running theme throughout Naomi’s life. It’s what connects the many hats she wears every day.

Whether it’s taking to the stage as Ada, educating people about the suffragettes while she’s entertaining them, researching the movement to uncover new angles, or any of her other roles, she keeps going back to the idea of how it connects to independent will and drive.

She speaks at a quick clip that matches what appears to be the fast pace of her life. That nonstop routine is partly out of necessity.

“I’m in a unique position of being an academic and a magician and a performer. So the thing is, obviously, I don’t have a day job. It’s on me to hustle to get funding. The pressure’s on me to just make everything work because I’m my own line manager, and if I go offline nothing’s going to happen,” she says.

“I would never have designed it this way. I’m not like, ‘I must live in worry and chaos.’ It’s not the dream,” she adds. “But it is how it’s been, and I’m very lucky to be able to do that. And the hustle is just trying to keep everything balanced. It keeps your brain going. And so the best thing I can do is go out and be curious, interested and confident and see what happens.”