UGLY SISTERS at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

★★★★

“It’s messy, muddy, beautifully chaotic but in a way which feels totally composed and in control”

On the day that The Female Eunuch was released in America in 1970, a transgender woman ran up to its author and one of the key voices in the second wave feminist movement, Germaine Greer, took her hand and thanked her for everything she’d done for women. In 1989, Greer wrote an article in The Independent, expressing deeply transphobic views, entitled ‘On Why Sex Change is a Lie’. Ugly Sisters examines this relationship, that between transgender women and someone who at one point might’ve been considered a progressive icon, in a show whose tone reads not as pure anger but rather crushing disappointment.

Early on, audience volunteers are encouraged to bury Greer’s body, after one of the performers Laurie Ward kills her. There’s a burial. The body is carried to the grave and ritually covered in handfuls of soil. But burial isn’t always a bad thing, as we’re informed ‘burial can nurture’. At other moments in the show, there’s dance, an interview, a sequence where they drink and spit out water at each other, scenes where they give Greer a very respected amount of patience and opportunity to correct her words. Obviously she doesn’t. And they’re just left feeling disappointed. In another moment, probably the most touching in the whole show, the other performer Charli Cowgill invites another volunteer to plait her hair. It takes about five minutes. It’s a beautiful, wholesome moment. Finding these moments of real humanity, of human connection, of strangers just caring for and looking after each other because it’s the genuinely good thing to do, is a real delight in a show which could so easily be just about visceral hate.

There are some great, often funny, often darkly-funny interactions with the show’s Stage Manager, Daze Corder. An electric sound design pulses and pulsates, as the performers thrash or jump or swing their bodies; one of Ward’s costumes, a cage hoop skirt, moves elegantly with her. This is a common theme in the piece, moments of tenderness and beauty juxtaposed with small acts of violence of physical discomfort. It’s visually intriguing.

Beyond the visuals, the content is rich and intellectually layered. Ward and Cowgill take it in turns taking on the role of Greer in a piece which feels like some sort of therapeutic ritual at times. It’s messy, muddy, beautifully chaotic but in a way which feels totally composed and in control; one of those shows that you can spend just as much time thinking and talking about afterwards, and which you may very well want to then go and watch again.

UGLY SISTERS at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Underbelly, Cowgate – Big Belly

Reviewed on 13th August 2024

by Joseph Dunitz

Photography by Clémence Rebourg

UGLY SISTERS

UGLY SISTERS

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