‘Trans’ takes centre stage
Eve/adam/lilith: The Jungle Girl
The end of binary, diametric gender distinctions is nigh. Or so it would seem. Only a few weeks ago Justine Greening – Women and Equalities minister – introduced a controversial government initiative to make registering a change of gender easier. Now the Fringe – marking 70 years as an arts festival which has outsider-liness written in its DNA (it just happened on the back of the 1947 International Festival) – is busting all over with shows that explore what it means to be a “man” and a “woman”.
Down at Summerhall, Trans Creative, the UK’S first transgender-led company, are offering an autobiographical piece about transitioning called You’ve Changed. At the Pleasance, Testosterone accompanies a transgender man into a male gym changing room for the first time since receiving his initial testosterone injection.
The Traverse has become trans central, though. A notice outside the gents reads: “The Traverse Theatre aims to be a trans and non-binary inclusive space and as such we encourage patrons to please use the facilities that best fit their gender identity or expression.” Not just a sign of the times – it reflects 2017’s attitude-testing body of work.
If you’re inclined to raise an eyebrow in irritation at that advisory, then I’d urge you to hear all about Eve (★★★★★), a brave, searing and sorrowful solo turn from playwright Jo Clifford, who, at 67, has been father to two children, lived (as John) with their mother for 33 years and decided, after she died, to express the woman within – kept submerged since the earliest confused inklings as a child. There came a culminating crisis of desperate unhappiness and a choice “between living as a woman, or dying as a man”.
Clifford stands barefoot in a flowing grey dress with lankish hair, photos of past selves (angelic Fifties boy, haunted boarding-school youth, tired-eyed dad) materialising and disappearing behind her. She recalls the attendant fears of using a ladies’ cubicle (“I mustn’t cough”), and, more poignantly still, her efforts while watching The Ring Circle at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, to find the building’s only gender neutral toilet – a quest that involved a security guard treating her like human waste.
I found it a compelling, moving and eye-opening 70 minutes (co-written with Chris Goode, directed by Susan Worsfold and presented by National Theatre of Scotland) even if the tone sometimes suffers from a monotonous quality of calm, insistent mournfulness.
By way of contrast, it has been programmed alongside Adam (★★★★★). The “true story of a young trans man” (Egyptian Adam Kashmiry, making his stage-debut) and how he came – via lonely alienation from his girl’s body, a punishingly long period of detention seeking asylum in Scotland and risky, despairing DIY hormone therapy – to be the charismatic, emboldened and happily masculine figure we see standing before us.
Scripted by Frances Poet, with direction by Cora Bissett, it ingeniously divides the female and male incarnations of its hero between actors (Neshla Caplan playing his younger self). The piece then tops that eloquent role-playing with a hugely powerful moment of awakening. Yearning to understand whether it’s possible for “the soul of a man to be trapped in the body of a woman,” Adam goes online and we’re greeted with a choir of “trans” voices from across the world, 120 in all, all with words of life-saving reassurance: “We are you, we hear you, we understand”. On paper, perhaps that sounds glib; in the flesh it’s an unforgettable thunderbolt of feeling.
Last but not least (from Australia’s Sisters Grimm) comes comic relief in the gender-bending Lilith: The Jungle Girl (★★★★★). The title evokes the mythological figure of Adam’s “first” recusant wife. More simply, it’s the name given by two mad-scientist types – Sir Charles Penworth (Candy Bowers, sending up patriarchal pomposity) and sidekick Helen (Genevieve Giuffre) – to the naked male-membered “mudmonster” (a pink-slime-covered Ash Flanders) who, reared by lions in the wilds of Borneo, has been shipped to pastiched 19th-century Holland to become “civilised”.
Very quirky and skittishly fresh, it’s deceptively clever in the way it tackles the fraught subject of assimilation and caps a tremendous, thought-provoking start to the Fringe.