This brave, filthy and fantastic show by Charli Cowgill and Laurie Ward (together known as piss/CARNATION) returns to London at Soho Upstairs from 5-16 Mar. For my review of its previous showing at the Pleasance, go here.
Where: Soho Theatre
When: 5-16 Mar
Ticket link: https://sohotheatre.com/events/52-monologues-for-young-transexuals/
Laurie took some time out from preparing for the show to tell us a bit more about it!
Congratulations on the return of your show! I absolutely loved it at the Pleasance. Are you excited to bring it back to London?
Thank you, Lou! We’re beyond excited to be bringing the show back to London. While we were creating the show in a basement university room, we would joke about the day we took it to Soho.
Naturally, we feel completely thrilled and in disbelief about it actually happening. We cannot wait to turn their upstairs room into a hot-pink hyperpop spitty nightmare.
You are clearly close friends who trust each other in what is a very full-on and powerful show. How did you come to create 52 Monologues?
Wow, well we met at University, let’s start there. And we met in a way that feltquite… cosmic? We tell the story of how we met on a double date, in the show,LOL.
But we had recently gone through really similar experiences with sexual
partners, both felt the same disillusionment around being trans in Cambridge and both had the same energy for crazy, queer, high-octane experimental theatre.
Sowe got talking and very quickly we realised that we needed to put this energy and these experiences into something. And the show really started as this whacko, vengeful, angry scream into the void.
We were really quite angry at the cis people around us in Cambridge, who seemed blind to these horrible things that were happening all the time.
So we made a show! Now it is much more delicately considered, I would say, but still with a heavy dose of that rage.
How would you describe the show to someone who knows nothing about it?
52 Monologues for Young Transsexuals is an experimental, audacious, no-holds-barred ride through transfemme experiences of love and sex.
There’s something sinister about the show; you’ll be lured in and you won’t realise you’ve had the air knocked out of you until it’s too late. It’s up to you where you go next.
The show combines the spirit of cabaret with the experimentation and rawness of performance art, and we loop it all together with the structured-ness of theatre.
In all, it’ll leave you laughing, crying, breathless, and probably more than a little scared.
You both include your own experiences as trans women in the show. How important was it to be open and honest in this way with each other and the
audience?
Honesty is completely central to what we do as theatremakers. We have to behonest about our experiences; as marginalised people it feels like one of the few tools of self-empowerment we have at our disposal.
And dishonest theatre is useless – trans girls would feel disappointed, and cis people would feel that they know the tea when they just don’t.
But also increasingly, we are experimenting with “boundaries”? Which is a new thing for us? Like- maybe, actually, audiences don’t need to know everything about us.
In fact there are some things that for our own sanity need to be kept sacred. We’ll keep you posted on how that goes. But also aesthetically – we love confession.
We both really developed our artistic taste through feminist autofiction – Jeanette Winterson, Deborah Levy, etc., and queer feminist theatre – HOTTERproject, Katy Dye… all of these artists use honesty in creative and powerful ways.
Also, Laurie was raised Catholic, so there’s that. We just love the spectacle of a confession.
Trans women have had a very hard time from some quarters recently. Do you see a time this might change and in the meantime, do you feel you are safe to speak out?
It feels impossible to speculate about change, but what is for certain is that it’s not an easy time to make work as trans women (though, has it ever been?).
What is unique to the climate right now is the completely vitriolic acid-trip on social media and in the press, which we have caught some ugly attention from. But to be honest, we are pretty good at batting this off.
We try to stay in our lane and focus on the work because we have never set out to convince people of our humanity… so we don’t serve those people!
And finally, you ask audience members to spit in a glass. What’s that all about?!
Feeling brave? Come and find out.