Falling/Flying

 

I fall, I descend: unable to connect to the dual personality in front of me, the hospital death bed drama has uncertain meaning, the unravelling of self into masculine and feminine polarities more important than the illness that brought them to this place of dying. On screens above and behind, nurses walk by, peer and disappear, while the stage becomes the arena for seduction and battle, two egos in one body trying to become reconciled.

The theatre, a better place for thinking, let Stef Smith write out this life story of otherness and alienation, let Ros Philips direct and shed light on the gentle conflict. Beautifully posed, beautifully studied, beautifully blocked: where the script is allusive and elusive, the direction is crystal clear, a mime show of contrast and reunion played out beneath the words. And fragments of adventures – the first sight of an idol, a seduction in a bar, the theft of cosmetics (symbolic of the male usurping the female world), meeting an ex-lover never brave enough to embrace the fulsome quidity of the other – are scattered across a direct appeal to the audience for understanding.
The androgyne, so often an alchemical symbol, a spiritual idea, is caught in the black prison of physicality: reduced to an outcast, victim of childish prejudice, clinging to moments of art that justify the dark questionings and the refusal of the normative.

Paris is Burning, a period docu-drama of queers and New York outsiders, is a rare affirmation of the transgendered identity: the last words, echoed from the soundtrack, become a poignant lament for a human reaching to transcendence purely through being fully themselves. Whether this over-reaching ambition killed the androgyne, or some other illness to which the flesh is heir destroyed, it matters not. Sometimes theatre is enough as an appeal, a lamentation, a glimpse at lives less understood.