The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Taking a lead on gender identity
Two transgender actors take centre stage to bring their experiences to life in a double bill of pioneering plays and shed fresh light on an important issue: Eve and Adam, Dundee Rep Theatre, May 24 to 26
Last August at the Edinburgh Festival, the National Theatre of Scotland – under new artistic director Jackie Wylie – staged two productions bringing to light human stories that have largely been hidden in darkness. While the experience of being transgender (a biological man who identifies as a woman, or a woman who identifies as a man) is likely still a mystery to many people, awareness of and legal protection for transgender people is growing.
The NTS’ shows Eve and Adam not only tell the life stories of two transgender people, but place the individuals involved up there on stage with no need for actors to play their parts.
This makes their tales even more human and relatable. The plays are unconnected beyond their theme and can be seen individually but, at Dundee Rep this month, they form a double bill.
“When I first saw Adam, he looked to me just like this cute teenage boy, a little bit gangly, a little bit grungy,” says Cora Bissett, director of Adam. She’s talking about the play’s central actor and character Adam Kashmiry, who she saw on the studio stage at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, at an event organised by the Scottish Refugee Council and the Citz.
“He was performing a little monologue about his life, and he began telling this story of how he had been born in Egypt, biologically female, and how he had fallen in love with another girl but he knew he wasn’t a girl inside,” says Glenrothes-raised Cora, creator of plays including Glasgow Girls and Roadkill.
“He was a boy falling in love with a girl, he wasn’t a gay girl. This felt profoundly weird to him, he thought he was mad.”
Adam sought refuge and help on the internet. “He typed in ‘I feel like I’m a man trapped inside a woman’s body’, and of course the internet sent back thousands of similar stories. At that moment he realised this was a real thing, and he wasn’t alone.”
The play tells of Adam’s understanding and acceptance of who he is, but also of being ostracised by his family and his flight to Britain as an asylum seeker, fearing the harm he might face at home.
Looking for an actor and uncertain about the politics of casting a non-trans male or non-Arab actor in the lead, Cora was overjoyed when Adam agreed to play himself.
“It’s remarkable, isn’t it?” says Jo Clifford, writer and sole performer in Eve. “That you’re actually seeing Adam, that he’s lived through all that. Hopefully a similar thing happens when people watch Eve, in that I’m doing it, I’m bearing witness, and also contradicting and resisting all the shame put on me at an early age.”
Jo is an Edinburgh-based playwright with a number of Scotland’s bestregarded plays of recent times in her CV.
Eve is about her life, from fear and shame in the 1950s and 1960s for not being a masculine boy, to life with her beloved late wife Sue Innes when she was called John Clifford, to her full transition around 14 years ago.
“It’s a dialogue between me and my past self, my male self,” says Jo, “and a look back on life, because I’m 68 now. It’s a personal journey from not knowing quite who I was to acceptance and fulfilment. It’s a happy story, which is partly about the experience of being transgendered, but actually I believe nowadays that it’s a story of everybody’s lives. We all have to try to find out who we really are, and to live life as truly and authentically and honestly as we can.
“There has been something in the air recently, the changes are amazing. When I was young there was absolutely no possibility of ever being able to live openly as a trans person, it was something I had to hide.
“And yet here I am living openly, as people can’t do in many countries over the world. I’m very lucky to be living in Scotland and to have legal protection.”
It’s a dialogue between myself and my past self...