OTHERLAND
Almeida Theatre
★★★★
“This is a jaunty and compassionate production”
The confetti thrown in good cheer remains on the stage long after the wedding is over and the marriage has fallen apart in writer Chris Bush’s personal exploration of otherness and identity.
The reason for the break-up is not a dark secret revealed. Harry (Fizz Sinclair) has never hidden her yearning to escape her male body and Jo (Jade Anouka) – as a place-holder response – has always declared an attraction to women, so what’s the problem?
The writer calls on her own experiences coming out as trans to inform a script rich with frail humanity, grief and laughter.
One of the joys of director Ann Yee’s production is the four-strong chorus (Danielle Fiamanya, Laura Hanna, Beth Hinton-Lever and Serena Manteghi). They provide a sumptuous cacophony of well-calibrated, well-meaning voices, while occasionally bursting into snippets of siren song.
They become the friends who judge-don’t-judge the former golden couple. They are the bumptious official who can’t understand why the paperwork doesn’t tally, the fertility doctor with grim news, the HR woman tiptoeing around preferred toilet arrangements.
With a brisk and delightful energy, these vignettes of love, confusion and bureaucracy spill and elide and crash into one other. At pace, Jo goes crazy, drops out, and finds new love up a mountain with Gabby (a hoot, as played by Amanda Wilkin). Harry drifts aimlessly in a twilight world, not one thing or another.
On a rare trip out Harry is harassed by a man at a railway station. She is ill-equipped to cope, having no hinterland, and feels the experience “violating and validating”. Her girlfriends ask why she would opt for all that, the burden of the female sex, as if it were a lifestyle choice. Even then, Harry can’t join them on a protest march against gender violence because it’s not her story. Meanwhile, her exasperated mother (Jackie Clune) suggests she might like to switch back for a family wedding because “it’s not all about you”.
Jade Anouka and Fizz Sinclair perform wonders in their roles. Anouka is a bundle of nervous energy – and a devil on the dancefloor – while Sinclair carries a certain pained stillness, facing upheaval with the stoicism of necessity.
The end of the first act leaves both partners facing monstrous change. Jo is reluctantly pregnant and Harry about to pursue an irreversible course of hormones.
The beginning of the second act goes somewhere else entirely. They become literal monsters. We are in a fever dream cocoon where the misfits come to resolve themselves.
In a somewhat jarring sequence, Jo becomes a robot with a baby-filled silver cloche for a belly. She is alien to Gabby and to herself. Harry, thrashing in the shallows, is a fish-woman, caught in the net of some 18th century natural philosopher and put on show for the gawpers and prodders. While visually striking, it is an odd excursion, and we particularly feel the absence of Anouka’s jittery powerhouse presence. When they return to themselves, it’s a relief.
This is a jaunty and compassionate production, brilliantly designed and lit (Fly Davis and Anna Watson) and elevated by crisp direction and staging. The cast captures the glorious mess and majesty of change with impish relish and the production does an important job giving character to a story frequently lost to ranting headlines.
Chris Bush says this play has been a decade in the making and a lifetime in the preparation. Fortunately, no-one else has to wait that long.
OTHERLAND
Almeida Theatre
Reviewed on 20th February 2025
by Giles Broadbent
Photography by Marc Brenner
Previously reviewed at this venue:
WOMEN, BEWARE THE DEVIL | ★★★★ | February 2023
