Otherland at the Almeida Theatre review: this play about the trans experience is lively, humane and erratic
Three themes – the needs of a trans woman to live as herself, the pressure on women to reproduce, and the difficulty of entirely accommodating a partner – course through Chris Bush’s lively, humane and erratic play. It’s laced with music and given a fluid production by director Ann Yee. Though dramatically uneven and necessarily inconclusive, it’s very thoughtful, which is welcome in this era of yammering culture-war hatred.
We first see Jo (Jade Anouka) and Harry (Fizz Sinclair) hymned by a female chorus on their wedding day: “They are beautiful; they are *unbearable*.” But the couple’s idyllic relationship falters, then founders, when Harry comes out as trans and Jo, even though she’s “always liked girls”, can’t quite cope. Bush, the prolific Sheffield writer who had a hit with Standing at the Sky’s Edge, describes this “Big Trans Play™” as personal but not autobiographical.
The first half sees the couple struggle to make it work and details the countless chagrining moments that Harry, a scientist, is forced to live with. Not just outright hostility but the well-meaning obtuseness of colleagues and family. Harry’s émigré mum (Jackie Clune) wonders why Harry can’t “just” fly to a family party on her old, male-named passport, when the medical establishment requires her to live fully as a female in order to get treatment.
Other characters constantly imply that Harry’s transition is something faddish or indulgent, a want rather than a need. Bush also gives space to the view that those not born female can never fully know what it’s like to be a woman. When Harry is sexually harassed for the first time, she finds the experience “violating and validating”.
Jo meanwhile celebrates the freedom of being disconnected from her relationship and her contraceptive device by getting a bad tattoo of an empty plug socket and going on the Inca Trail in Peru. Where she immediately falls for a woman called Gabby (Amanda Wilkin). Sadly, this means their compound couple name is “Jobby”. Worse, Gabby wants kids when Jo absolutely doesn’t. Then it transpires that Gabby can’t carry a child…
The second half takes a wild swerve into metaphor. Jo’s feelings of being a mere baby-carrier sees her transformed into a robot host. Harry, meanwhile, becomes a mer-creature – half woman, half fish – rescued from a fishing net to become an object of curiosity for Victorian scientists, then reviled as a monster when she tries to fit in with land-based, female society.
These scenes are entertaining but jarring. The shift from naturalism and the split narrative don’t entirely work, which Bush seems to acknowledge in a tacked-on meeting in a café where Harry and Jo tie up all the loose ends. Anouka, a firecracker stage presence, is as watchable as ever, while Sinclair exudes a mix of dignity and vulnerability.
The chorus falls too often into generic attitudes and Jennifer Whyte’s music is pleasing but unremarkable. I liked the sense of unity in Yee’s production, though, with the chorus circling Fly Davis’s round wooden set. A pool that’s part womb, part petri dish appears in the second half, and there are visual references to the Meridian line at Greenwich, a starting point and a borderline that “only exists because someone says it does”. Though Otherland isn’t totally successful it tackles hot button issues with sensitivity and compassion. Something media and politicians seem incapable of.
The Almeida Theatre, to March 15; almeida.co.uk
