Mille and Alissia have taken some time out of rehearsals to chat to me about Le Grand Soir which is performing at The Glitch, on October 5th at 5:30 pm.
What was the inspiration behind your show?
The inspiration behind the show has to be our Dads: the uncanny similarities between them and how they raised (or didn’t raise) us, giving us very specific, weird, common experiences that we hadn’t encountered in someone else before. We found joy, quiet understanding and new perspectives in this bond, linking us – a non-binary mixed French and Chinese drag performer and a lesbian French and Russian circus artist and theatre-maker – in ways we didn’t expect. Both our Mums are French, both our Dads live abroad in their country of origin, now capitalist but with a heavy communist background, both live with another family of their own, both are struggling to understand some of the things that matter to us and make us who we are – arts, queerness, communities. We truly believe that one of the things we need today and that performance shows can bring to us is this sense of community, of belonging despite apparent differences: that is why we started working on Le Grand Soir. What we found at the intersection of this is our need for tenderness and forgiveness: beyond all the jokes, beyond all the pain, there is a clarity in what we choose to forgive and what we don’t, that help us – and, we hope, the audience – bring more peace in our relationships, and within ourselves.
How long has your production been in progress?
Mille had the very first idea of a performance show about our Dads on a hiking trail in Hong Kong back in May 2024. Since Alissia lives in Paris and Mille in Lyon, there was a lot of writing back and forth, WhatsApp calls, trains, random texts and pictures at unruly hours over the summer. We had our first rehearsal at Mille’s Mum’s flat in Paris in October 2024, our first work-in-progress showcase at Theatre Deli in April 2025. We’re premiering at Lambeth Fringe this October 5th a year after our first rehearsal!
Where are planning on taking the play next?
After the Lambeth Fringe, we’re heading up to the Voilà Festival, where we’re having two showcases on November 5th and 6th at the Etcetera Theatre. Next, we’d love to have a longer run in a queer theatre; a bigger Fringe experience maybe; a tour definitely – and in our wildest dreams, we’re bringing this show not only to the UK, but to our “home” countries as well: France, Russia, and China.
What would you like audiences to take away from your show?
Ali: I would love this performance to give more visibility to queer friendships. It became so rare to see those relationships not ending up actually being love stories on stage. I hope telling our story can also be a way to say how healing queer friendships can be, how strong and powerful they get when they stand together through political, social and cultural hardships. That they are a big and beautiful community of people who share a common fight. Queer friendship has its own kind of love.
Mille: I hope the audience can take away a certain sense of serenity, the one that comes from facing an emotional hardship, understanding it deeper and if not coming to terms with it, at least compromising with it. I hope the audience also takes home sensations, images and bits of stories about the joy, complexities and beauty of being mixed – not in a fetishizing way, but in a “this is the shit that we have to deal with and we do” way.
What are you looking forward to most about performing your show?
What always amazes us the most and thus what we look forward to is audience interactions. We have several moments in the show where we share a lot of intimacy with the audience, and offer them a chance to share some with us: the beauty of those vulnerable, collective moments is one of the main reasons why we created this show. As every audience reacts differently to our performance proposals, we’re incredibly excited to see what the Lambeth Fringe audience will do with us for on our Grand Soir.
Why did you choose your particular Fringe venue?
We love The Glitch, its history, its welcoming team, its continuous support for bold, emerging queer art. I (Mille) had the pleasure of performing there twice in amazing drag shows (shout out to Carrot’s Enby show and to Bi-Curious George’ Free Range!), and I can’t wait for Alissia to discover this place. We’re also thrilled to be a part of the programming in the new basement space!
Which shows at the Fringe are you planning on watching?
For poetry and emotional laughs, Clouds on September 26th and Closeted on October 25th, both at The Glitch; for gut-punching theatre, The Immigrant Play on October 4th at the Bread&Roses Theatre. If we manage, we’d also love to catch some quality Asian stories with Neither Here Nor There on September 29th at The Golden Goose Theatre, as well as Open Source Intelligence and Counterinsurgency for the Jobbing Hater on October 6-7th at The Bread&Roses Theatre.
Have you had any major hurdles to overcome to get this production on the stage?
We’re actually French (sacrebleu) and part of a dance-theatre company back in France, where we have been struggling with creating queer shows there for several years now. When we had the first ideas and excitement around Le Grand Soir, we thought: they’ll never let us do that in France now. So, thanks to Mille’s connections with the drag scene and a bit of the theatre scene in London (which is an entirely different story, that starts with a Welsh boy and a Chinese drag king), we said to ourselves “you know what, fuck it, let’s write it in English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, let’s break genre barriers like the shows we love in the UK, let’s do it in the UK”. So we applied to a bunch of programmes, managed to got in Shift+Space at Theatre Deli, did a fantastic work in progress there back in April 2025, and then applied to some festivals to premiere the show, and here we are!
What other productions have you previously been involved with?
Within our company in France, we worked together on one play before this one: a dance-theatre show about a lesbian couple and healing processes, called Guérir (titre provisoire), that premiered in January 2024. Alissia was the percussionist and choreographer of the show, and Mille a performer and the co-writer of the text with Jeanni Dura. Alissia also choreographed another dance-theatre play, from company La Conciergerie, called Le drap d’une femme, about the experience of rape, premiering in April 2024. Mille was the director and lighting designer of a one drag king show called O.E.U.F for musician drag king le conteur sans histoire, premiering in November 2024; and co-created with him Cartographies d’un embrasement, a show blending drag, lesbian poetry and live music, in 2025. Le Grand Soir is our first English and international production.
https://lambethfringe.com/events/le-grand-soir
https://www.instagram.com/le.grand.soir/
Theatre, Art and Film Reviews 
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