Review: OTHERLAND, Almeida Theatre

Armed with a dream-like blend of tender poetry and pulsating humanity Chris Bush has established herself as one of the UK’s most erudite and important writers. Standing at The Sky’s Edge paid homage to the evolution of a Sheffield community and rightfully stormed the Olivier awards. Now her theatrical focus turns inwards.

In Otherland you can sense Bush’s lived experience as a trans woman delicately coiled within the play’s DNA. Take the way each cold shoulder and micro-aggression from friends and family aggregate into an impenetrable wall of isolation for trans woman Harry. Dialogue is lived in. It’s second-handed warmth from someone else’s touch, impossible to resist its endearing charm.

Harry and Jo have divorced. The former has come out as trans, straining Jo’s sexuality and soon their relationship. Their romantic past is consigned to memory and they amicably go their separate ways. From there the narrative bifurcates into interweaving strands. Freewheeling Jo embraces her singledom with tacky tattoos, exotic holidays, and eventually a new lover. Harry struggles to continue transitioning, leaping through bureaucratic hoops, and struggling to integrate into a hostile world that will not recognise her.

 “You’ll just have to put that suit back on” instructs Harry’s unaccepting mother, not wanting their daughter to upstage a family event. Fizz Sinclair’s Harry wears a stoic mask fronted with a concrete scowl. Underneath we sense the well of hardship echoing beneath, her female soul at odds with her recognisably masculine body.

But just as you think you can grasp it, Bush pulls the narrative rug from under us with a genre-bending twist. Otherland playfully melts into a swirling magical realist standoff between gothic and sci-fi. Harry is reimagined as a humanoid sea creature trapped in a net and writhing in a pool of water.  

Meanwhile Jo, now reluctantly pregnant as a surrogate mother for her lover who cannot give birth, is imagined as a monotone android, with wires sprawling from her body. Neon lights, icy and blue, flicker and whir around her, sapping the last morsels of her freewheeling humanity. Both Harry and Jo strive for humanity beyond the confines of their corporeality, the same sides of the coin but stratified across genres.

It’s obvious that most of the second act’s fantastical elements are a thinly veiled back and forth between gender critical feminists and trans women. Harry is rejected “from the land” branded as a sea creature “imitating” a human by a community of torch wielding women. A lesser playwright would bask in the furore, but Bush’s focus is always on the human heart beating beneath the strained surface, especially when it finds moments of joyous jubilation which director Ann Yee gleefully ramps up to eleven.

An all-female chorus break out in sporadic outbursts of song and dance, scenes breathlessly waltz into each other, even with the spine cracking tonal shifts. It’s not perfect, but embrace it’s bittersweetness, especially when the sweetness triumphs.

Otherland plays at the Almeida Theatre until March 15

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