Most of my portrait bookings ask for the same thing: put the subject at ease, get a natural expression, make them look like themselves on a good day. Earlier this year I had a booking that asked for the opposite.
The Brief: A Fading Star Turned Panto Villain
I was booked to shoot promotional images for Slay Belles, a dark comedy drama written and directed by Anna-Lisa Maree, staged at the Tabard Theatre ahead of its March run. The play is set backstage during a pantomime on Christmas Eve, following Linda Godfrey, a former 1980s sitcom star cast as the Wicked Queen, as the ghosts of her past start to surface mid-show.
Linda is played by Cath Rice, an award-winning comedian known for The Be All and End All, Making It! and Our Bev. The promotional images needed to do more than introduce the character. They needed to hint at everything underneath her: the faded fame, the desperation, the menace she’s using to hold herself together.
Why a Straight Headshot Wouldn’t Have Worked
A polished, symmetrical headshot tells an audience “here is a person.” It doesn’t tell them “here is someone unravelling.” For Slay Belles, the images needed real dramatic weight: a crown crooked rather than perfectly placed, teeth bared instead of a polite smile, hands caught mid-gesture rather than resting calmly.
That meant working with Cath in full costume and character rather than directing a conventional portrait sitting. Some of the strongest frames came from small, almost accidental moments: the second before she adjusted the crown herself, a hand reaching toward camera as if it were reaching for something the character couldn’t quite hold onto.
The Rest of the Cast Needed a Different Energy Entirely
Alongside Linda, the promotional set covered the wider cast: the exhausted producer keeping the show on track, the loyal crew member, and Linda’s daughter caught in the middle of it all. Group shots needed a completely different register to the solo villain portraits, more grounded, more like a genuine ensemble caught mid-conversation than a formally posed cast photo.
Moving between those two registers in the same session, dramatic solo character work and naturalistic group photography, is exactly the kind of variety that makes promotional theatre photography interesting. Nothing about the brief was static.
What This Kind of Brief Actually Requires
Promotional photography for a stage production isn’t really about capturing what the show looks like. It’s about capturing what the show feels like, condensed into a handful of still images that have to do the selling before anyone’s bought a ticket. That means working closely with a performer who is committed to the character, being ready to catch a genuine moment rather than a held pose, and understanding the tone of the production well enough to know what a “good” shot even means for this particular story.
Slay Belles is dedicated to the memory of Giles Edwin Bishop, a drag performer and theatrical costumier who regularly performed at London’s Way Out Club. It’s the kind of production with real weight behind it, and it was a genuine pleasure to help put a face, several faces, to that story ahead of its run.
If you’re staging a production and need promotional photography that captures character rather than just likeness, get in touch. That’s exactly the sort of brief I want more of.
