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【衛報】Edinburgh festival：「變性人」故事表演
Thursday 10 August 2017 09.55 BST
The Guardian[/size=2]
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/aug/10/youve-changed-adam-transeve-testosterone-transgender-plays-edinburgh-festival-lyn-gardner[/size=2]
[/center]
B[/size=6]ack in the 1970s and 80s, in the early days of feminist theatre, the stories told were often a form of consciousness-raising themselves. In recounting their experiences, the women telling them were changing the world. The theatrical form was a vehicle for the story, a way for feminist theatre-makers to tell us about their journey and signpost the future.
On the Edinburgh fringe this summer, a new group of pioneers are telling their stories. In a festival where identity politics is a significant theme, the experiences of transgender men and women are taking centre stage. As with those early feminist theatre-makers, simply telling your personal story is often deemed sufficient, although that does then raise the question about exactly what it is that the audience is applauding at the end: the story – often a quite recognisably traditional one of triumph over adversity – or the piece of theatre itself?
In Eve, at the Traverse, playwright Jo Clifford offers up her story unadorned. There is a simple undeniable power as Clifford, who as a child “looked in the mirror and saw a boy and didn’t know who he was”, sits before us in a white dress and gently recounts her journey in an emotional sing-song voice.
She offers verbal snapshots and photographic evidence of growing up afraid and bewildered as an upper middle-class child in a stiff-lipped 1950s world, in a family that sent her away to boarding school to be turned into a man. It was more than 40 years before she took the advice of a trans friend who went on to drink herself to death and who told Jo that she had the choice “between living as a woman or dying as a man”. Clifford chose life and not just life, but a life “without shame.”
It’s the personal story that is also the focus for Kate O’Donnell in You’ve Changed (Northern Stage at Summerhall). It’s a show that comes wrapped in the tropes of cabaret as O’Donnell traces her personal journey and transition at the age of 38, during an hour in which she begins dressed as Fred Astaire and transforms into Ginger Rogers. The best moment is when O’Donnell makes a show of gender itself, giving her vagina its own little peep show complete with miniature velvet curtains, a neat way of reminding us that “gender lives in the head not in the genitalia.” But as a piece of theatre, it suffers from an awkward construction – and the joins are distractingly visible.
More theatrically sophisticated and potent is Adam at the Traverse, Frances Poet’s sensitive and clever crafting of the story of Adam Kashmiry, a young Egyptian man who not only had to journey across the border controls erected around gender but also the borders of countries. This is a journey from female to male, and from Egypt to Glasgow. It is performed on stage not just by Kashmiry but also by Neshla Caplan as the female element of Adam.
This duality works brilliantly, showing up the absurdity of the gender binary model and making manifest the male in the female and the female in the male. The two become constantly shifting overlaying images of each other as Adam is caught in a system where he cannot access help from a gender clinic until he is given asylum and cannot get asylum until he can prove that he really is transgender.
His desperation is depicted in violent detail, but essentially this is a happy-ever-after fairytale. Director Cora Bissett piles on the imagery (a knife raised to cut off a breast, a foot that will no longer fit into a female shoe) and employs Jocelyn Pook’s score, performed by the Adam World Choir – a global digital community of transgender and non-binary people – to glorious and often joyous effect.
If Adam charts the struggle to become a man, Rhum and Clay’s Testosterone (Pleasance Courtyard) explores what it means to be a man. Writer Kit Redstone was 33 when he transitioned, and while Testosterone has making the change in common with these other shows, his multi-layered and gripping physical theatre piece is much more than what Redstone wickedly satirises as another story about “brave little trans soldiers”.
Instead, the focus is on the cocksure rituals, the preening and signals that masculinity wraps itself in as Redstone finds himself in the male changing rooms facing a cowboy-style showdown over a towel. The physical theatre element is occasionally a little over-emphatic and extended, but this is a refreshing, genuinely smart piece of work, full of undercutting humour – including a rendition of It’s Raining Men – which reminds that transitioning is a beginning not an ending.
The Guardian[/size=2]
[/center]B[/size=6]ack in the 1970s and 80s, in the early days of feminist theatre, the stories told were often a form of consciousness-raising themselves. In recounting their experiences, the women telling them were changing the world. The theatrical form was a vehicle for the story, a way for feminist theatre-makers to tell us about their journey and signpost the future.
On the Edinburgh fringe this summer, a new group of pioneers are telling their stories. In a festival where identity politics is a significant theme, the experiences of transgender men and women are taking centre stage. As with those early feminist theatre-makers, simply telling your personal story is often deemed sufficient, although that does then raise the question about exactly what it is that the audience is applauding at the end: the story – often a quite recognisably traditional one of triumph over adversity – or the piece of theatre itself?
In Eve, at the Traverse, playwright Jo Clifford offers up her story unadorned. There is a simple undeniable power as Clifford, who as a child “looked in the mirror and saw a boy and didn’t know who he was”, sits before us in a white dress and gently recounts her journey in an emotional sing-song voice.
She offers verbal snapshots and photographic evidence of growing up afraid and bewildered as an upper middle-class child in a stiff-lipped 1950s world, in a family that sent her away to boarding school to be turned into a man. It was more than 40 years before she took the advice of a trans friend who went on to drink herself to death and who told Jo that she had the choice “between living as a woman or dying as a man”. Clifford chose life and not just life, but a life “without shame.”
It’s the personal story that is also the focus for Kate O’Donnell in You’ve Changed (Northern Stage at Summerhall). It’s a show that comes wrapped in the tropes of cabaret as O’Donnell traces her personal journey and transition at the age of 38, during an hour in which she begins dressed as Fred Astaire and transforms into Ginger Rogers. The best moment is when O’Donnell makes a show of gender itself, giving her vagina its own little peep show complete with miniature velvet curtains, a neat way of reminding us that “gender lives in the head not in the genitalia.” But as a piece of theatre, it suffers from an awkward construction – and the joins are distractingly visible.
More theatrically sophisticated and potent is Adam at the Traverse, Frances Poet’s sensitive and clever crafting of the story of Adam Kashmiry, a young Egyptian man who not only had to journey across the border controls erected around gender but also the borders of countries. This is a journey from female to male, and from Egypt to Glasgow. It is performed on stage not just by Kashmiry but also by Neshla Caplan as the female element of Adam.
This duality works brilliantly, showing up the absurdity of the gender binary model and making manifest the male in the female and the female in the male. The two become constantly shifting overlaying images of each other as Adam is caught in a system where he cannot access help from a gender clinic until he is given asylum and cannot get asylum until he can prove that he really is transgender.
His desperation is depicted in violent detail, but essentially this is a happy-ever-after fairytale. Director Cora Bissett piles on the imagery (a knife raised to cut off a breast, a foot that will no longer fit into a female shoe) and employs Jocelyn Pook’s score, performed by the Adam World Choir – a global digital community of transgender and non-binary people – to glorious and often joyous effect.
If Adam charts the struggle to become a man, Rhum and Clay’s Testosterone (Pleasance Courtyard) explores what it means to be a man. Writer Kit Redstone was 33 when he transitioned, and while Testosterone has making the change in common with these other shows, his multi-layered and gripping physical theatre piece is much more than what Redstone wickedly satirises as another story about “brave little trans soldiers”.
Instead, the focus is on the cocksure rituals, the preening and signals that masculinity wraps itself in as Redstone finds himself in the male changing rooms facing a cowboy-style showdown over a towel. The physical theatre element is occasionally a little over-emphatic and extended, but this is a refreshing, genuinely smart piece of work, full of undercutting humour – including a rendition of It’s Raining Men – which reminds that transitioning is a beginning not an ending.
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