Edalia Day tells us that “this show is about being held by the universe” as she appears barefoot before us in a brown skirt and black sports bra. Based on two poems written in 2018 and 2022, Let People Like You is an intimate blend of poetry, music, and comedy, exploring identity, belonging, joy, and the painful realities of body dysphoria.
Day’s work is rooted in the experience of being trans, including the particular pressures faced by trans teenagers: “what are you if you’re not like them?” Yet the show avoids becoming narrowly defined by gender identity. Instead, Day uses her experience as a starting point for wider questions about acceptance, connection and learning to inhabit your own body.
Her songs and poems are frequently very funny, with an appealing silliness that sits alongside moments of genuine vulnerability. The stripped-back staging of a plain backdrop, microphone, guitar and music player – leaves nowhere to hide, but Day needs nowhere to hide. She commands the space through personality and language alone.
When I first saw her at the Vault Festival in 2020 with Too Pretty To Punch, I was struck by her audiovisual wizardry and forthrightness. At that time she identified more as non-binary than female, but the combination of confidence and vulnerability was already evident. Here, that directness remains, but the material feels more personal and reflective.
The poems in Let People Like You, particularly its ideas of sharing and standing together, are deceptively simple, yet ache with complexity. Day has a talent for finding humour without diminishing the seriousness of her subject matter.
She is not simply telling us what it means to be trans. She is a musical comedian, poet and social commentator, using the stage to ask what it means to let ourselves, and each other, be liked.
4 stars.
Let People Like You by Edalia Day was part of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
For more about Edalia Day, visit her website.
I reviewed this show from a recording provided by Edalia.