Modern feminism has gone too far. Discuss
To turn right out of Shepherd’s Bush Tube station this week is to pass heartbreaking “missing” posters pasted by relatives on bus shelters seeking loved ones not seen since the fire at nearby Grenfell Tower.
So much, theatrically, seems beside the point in the immediate aftermath of that horror – yet the Bush, by poignant coincidence, has programmed a work by the genderbending American playwright and performance artist Taylor Mac which, for all its dark humour, speaks powerfully about our deep need for a home, and how defined we are by our kith and kin. Isaac – played with lithe energy, touching incredulity and visible perturbation by Arthur Darvill in Nadia Fall’s fine UK premiere production – has returned from combat.
His traumatising job involved picking up body parts, causing him to gag now at the slightest queasy sight. And there’s plenty to get him chucking up in the small-town Californian starter-home he grew up in, perched above a landfill site (smart work from designer Ben Stones, ranging the audience on either side of this archetypal “white trash” environment). Everything has changed in the interim.
Arnold, his plumber father, has had a stroke and zombie-lurches about, incoherent and incontinent in a woman’s nightie enforced on him – along with hormone-changing smoothies, female make-up and an adult nappy – by his emancipated mother, Paige.
The latter, once domestically and sexually abused but now top-dog, presides over a strict anti-cleanliness policy, resulting in stuff strewn everywhere (“We don’t do cupboards any more. We don’t do order”).
Perhaps the biggest shock, though, lies in what has happened to Isaac’s sister: Maxine is now transgender sibling Max, who wants to be referred to as “ze”, not he or she, and “hir” (pronounced “here”), not him or her. As played, with beautiful understatement, by Ashley Mcguire, Paige imparts this information with a rapt gleam of zealotry.
Mac, 43, has ingeniously fashioned a piece that fits into the grand tradition of American dramas about family dysfunction while speaking to the confusions of identity, loyalty and belonging in our progressive age. This queer artist (himself the son of a Vietnam vet) shows surprising sympathy for the patriarchal devil – with Andy Williams’s abject Arnold, a scrap-heap male, whose job was taken by a “Chinese-american woman”, arguably more sinned against that sinning.
Paige isn’t magnanimous in her feminist victory – in fact, she’s so vehement in her crackdown on the old order, she’s almost a symbol of unchecked matriarchy; even Griffyn Gilligan’s slender, self-aware Max, assertively flexing boyish new muscles, bristles at the rigidity beneath “hir” mom’s embracing of gender fluidity.
Tensions grow to a head, as Isaac reasserts masculine authority and humanity in this domestic war zone, the mood tilting between amusing levity and raw pain. There’s a long, very funny tit-for-tat over whether the air-conditioning can stay on, but that scene culminates in a devastating act of ice-cold maternal rejection.
Niceness, let alone happiness, does not necessarily lie at the end of liberalism’s rainbow. Until July 22. Tickets: 020 8743 5050; bushtheatre.co.uk