Our bodies are strange, alien things. In her new play of two strikingly different halves, Chris Bush explores womanhood and the shifting identities of our skin. We are led through the eyes of Jo (Jade Anouka, restless and hungry) and Harry (Fizz Sinclair, stoic and soft) as their bodies go through enormous change, one becoming pregnant, the other starting to take hormones as she transitions. What a quietly radical act it is to lay a trans and cis experience side by side, and say look: this is what it is to be a woman.
No stranger to ambitious, expansive stories, Bush adapted the Odyssey for hundreds of performers across the country, and housed multiple generations on a Sheffield Estate in her Olivier Award-winning musical, Standing at the Sky’s Edge. She writes her characters’ hearts on their sleeves, always seeking connection even in situations of turmoil. She does the same here, as she throws Jo and Harry into these transitional, defining moments of their lives. Though at times the storytelling feels heavy-handed, with lyrics pointing out the obvious and messages overstated, in other moments the story challenges us with knotty, thorny, nuance.
We meet Jo and Harry on their wedding day, but the story quickly sweeps them apart when Harry starts to transition. Her journey is sometimes hard to watch, particularly the conversations with her mum (Jackie Clune, heart-breakingly pushy). ‘You can’t put your entire life on hold,’ she is told, as her mum fails to see that’s exactly what she’s been doing all this time. Bush doesn’t shy away from the resistance and rejection Harry faces, nor the endless demeaning logistical hurdles she has to jump over, yet what lightness Harry finds in being herself. How her shoulders lift.
Jo’s story takes longer to draw us in, with a detour to find herself in Peru that drags the play off course but brings in new love interest Gabby (Amanda Wilkin, wonderfully goofy). Gorgeously free-wheeling until she can’t have what she wants, Gabby begins to assert control over Jo’s body in lieu of her own. Ann Yee’s direction grounds us on Fly Davis’s circular set, an energetic chorus narrating and singing in beautiful harmony (music by Jennifer Whyte).
Then comes a slippery shift into dreamlike metaphor. Suddenly their lives grow feverish, Harry thrown back in time as Jo is lurched forward. With echoes of script and song filtering through, an amphibious creature attempts to make it on dry land in one world while a pregnant automaton gleams with a rotund silver belly in the other. It’s deliciously strange, Yee’s direction feeling more loose-hipped here, illuminating the surreality of the two womens’ experiences.
Those resistant to trans justice are hyper-fixated on using biology and bodies to draw distinct lines between cis and trans lives. To point out contrast, otherness. What Bush does so deftly is to use this same focus to do the opposite, holding up two life-altering bodily changes in parallel and compellingly illuminating them as two sides of the same female experience.
