52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals
Soho Theatre
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Soho Theatre -
I first met Piss/CARNATION’s Charli Cowgill while we fliered next to each other in Bristo Square during the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe. All we did was have a brief chat and exchange fliers, but I remember thinking: ‘she’s great – I bet her show is too. I have to go’. But, genuinely, how many times do you say that and then, because Edinburgh is a big huge mess of absurdity and exhaustion, you miss the show before you’re due to leave. This is what happened to me. But then, hallelujah, here they are getting a two-week transfer at Soho Theatre (4 - 16 March – that’s 4 more nights, honies!)
I am SO glad to have finally made it to see 52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals. Not just for the brilliant and mesmerising Charli Cowgill, but her wry, incisive – and gloriously bendy – counterpart Laurie Ward, too. The pair have made this piece to explore and expose not only their own experiences of trans-womanhood, but also those of a handful of other transwomen, whose words they perform from a bunch of ‘sleepover honest’ interviews.
If you go to 52 Monologues you will find: fun and sexy gorgeous-girl choreo; rivetingly provocative, hilariously candid verbatim dialogue; heartbreak; abjection; love; and just a sprinkling of lipsyncing ridiculousness.
Verbatim performance can often seem a little trite or stale – especially if it’s creating characters and ‘scenes’ out of the text. But Piss/CARNATION don’t contextualise other peoples words into a play, they simply transpose them in random, tangential, sometimes incoherent, spurts. The format is like ADHD on shrooms; it makes you want to listen more closely, wishing you hadn’t missed something because you were busy being sucked up in something else. But the beauty is in the thinking, in the missing and in the tuning back in. You leave wanting to see it again, or to buy the bloody playtext.
The lightheartedness and the solemnity of the production speaks to the easy rapport Piss/CARNATION built with interviewees. The joy, the laughs and the sadness, come from how openly the interviewees expressed themselves. Everything is interesting, everything is relevant, everything is sparkling with personality.
This production’s strength is that it’s not just a page-to-stage piece. The show is a living, breathing organism that has consciously evolved over each run and iteration. This is testament to the way Piss/CARNATION play with pace and flow throughout. They smartly move from slick and speedy verbatim segments, to slow movement, to rapido techno, before dropping us into a mucky puddle of stone cold, ferocious abjection and sadness.
On this, I particularly like that in this iteration, the pair openly question their use of abjection on stage. Something we learn from this production, if we were not already aware, is that transwomen are used to experiencing the pain of abjection; to the degree that the interviewees can gossip and laugh about it freely in an ‘isn’t this relatable’ way (particularly that of being a cis-man’s dirty little secret – or similar). Cowgill and Ward are clear to include a solemn and sincere letter to the audience, which is read at a moment of utter abjection performed by one performer unto another. This letter tells us that the scene has since been ‘cut’, since they’d been led to question how useful it is for audiences to see – and how safe it is for them to perform it. They speak about why they chose to cut, and instead, describe it to us, so that we can imagine the violence for ourselves.
This way is possibly more effective. They are able to reckon more forcefully with the violence, in the end, than they would in the less emotionally-safe alternative. But, then again, I will never know, because they won’t do it – and all the more power to them.
If you’d never heard of Piss/CARNATION before – you wouldn’t forget them after this! GO GO GOOOO!!!!
52 Monologues for Young Transexuals runs at Soho Theatre until the 16th March. You can get your tickets HERE, if you’re lucky…
FIVE STARS
Photo by Eva Diomidous.
