Edinburgh 2024 Review: UGLY SISTERS, Underbelly Cowgate

Karl Marx once said that “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce” – twisting this quotation into its structure, piss / CARNATION’s second Fringe production is neither tragic nor farcical, but rather quite fantastic. 

Ugly Sisters is one of those shows that leave you wondering what on earth you just watched – and then stays stuck in the back of your mind for days to follow. This follow-up to 52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals features a leafblower, a ballgown, nudity, dirt, and controversial feminist Germaine Greer. It’s a lot, sure, but in this bold, ambitious production, the result is a piece of theatre like no other.

Soon after her famous text The Female Eunuch was published in 1970, Germaine Greer met a trans woman, who held her hand and said "Thank you for all you have done for us girls". This brief interaction provides a jumping off point for creators and performers Laurie Ward and Charli Cowgill to lead us on a surreal odyssey through femininity, sisterhood, trans identity, and first impressions.

Immediately throwing audiences into a new reality, Ward and Cowgill begin by exploring what would happen if the trans woman killed and buried Germaine, as audience members carry Cowgill’s dead body towards a grave plot and scatter soil on her hair. What follows is an unpredictable journey through different realms of possibility, in a story told through verbatim audio, drag, dance, audience participation, lip-syncing and costuming. Ugly Sisters abounds with creativity and audacity, about as far from ‘playing it safe’ as it’s possible to get. 

Perhaps one of the most intriguing elements of Ugly Sisters is the way that Ward and Cowgill play with concepts of dressing up and of playing a role – adding another layer to their theatre practice, they cleverly take turns swapping between the role of Germaine and the role of the trans woman. All of the onstage chaos has rhyme and reason, even if it’s not always easy to spot – this is intelligent, knotty theatre that asks you to think, hard. The pair dance around the present day news stories around trans rights, putting Greer in an ‘Adult Human Female’ t-shirt and in doing so illustrating the lasting, pervasive nature of these ‘debates’. 

Ugly Sisters is such an expansive, ambitious show, that it can be easy to get lost, especially for audience members less familiar with their subject matter: Ward accurately describes it as a 'total fever dream'. Every so often the show teeters slightly too far into abstraction: its most impactful moments are those rooted in reality, such as the smart, tender ending. 

Radical in every sense of the word, piss / CARNATION’s sophomore performance marks them as stars on the rise – it’s not hard to see why this project won the Untapped Award. Theatremakers as bold and game-changing as this don’t come along often. 

Ugly Sisters runs at Underbelly Cowgate (Big Belly) until 25 August.

Cover Image Credit: Clemence Rebourg

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