Trans People Are Awful – what a brilliantly uncomfortable and intriguing title that should surely never be said aloud? But why not? Aren’t trans people just like everyone else? Well, that’s the whole point.
Written and performed by Ros Watt, this pitch-black comedy thriller is a provocative piece of new theatre that was born from Watt’s own experience of being told that being trans meant he could never be cast as a murderer and that the representation risk was simply too great.
This is his answer to that: a ferocious interrogation of what happens when marginalised characters are only ever permitted to be sympathetic, inspirational or morally instructive and what gets lost when complexity itself starts to feel dangerous.
In a garage in North-East Scotland, Boy – a young trans man – is preparing to document the final act of his life. Armed with a camera, a vivid imagination, an axe purchased on Facebook Marketplace and a considerable amount of blood, he begins recording what he frames as an explanation video for future true-crime fans. He is going to perform the “perfect” transition: murdering cis men to steal the body parts that will, he believes, finally make him whole. He knows the surgery will kill him. That, too, is part of the plan.
Through moral justifications, obsessive scrapbooks and increasingly unhinged confessions to camera, Boy constructs the version of himself he wants the world to remember. The result is theatrical, obscene, darkly uncomfortable, funny and repeatedly pushes the audience into the position of laughing at something while not being entirely sure they should be.
Then the plan unravels. The camera is turned off. What follows is something altogether more tender and more disturbing: a descent into desperate human connection, the kind that only becomes possible when the performance finally drops.
What makes Trans People Are Awful interesting is its absolute refusal to make things easy. Boy is not a monster. Boy is not a martyr. His actions are horrifying; the emotional logic underneath them – the isolation, the loneliness, the dysphoria, the internalised ideas about legitimacy, the longing to simply be understood without qualification – is all devastatingly recognisable.
It is horror, psychological drama and grotesque comedy at once. It isn’t for the weak of stomach, with blood and guts and jars of potential penises, waiting to be sewn on. It’s a difficult watch but an important message of how trans people are just like everyone else.
★★★★
Reviewed by West End Wilma
Trans People Are Awful plays at Pleasance Courtyard until 31 August
Read other reviews I have written of Edinburgh Fringe shows over the years
