Review: UGLY SISTERS, Soho Theatre

“What does a woman feel like?” Not an easy question for any woman, cis or trans, to answer, and Ugly Sisters, an Edinburgh Fringe transfer from transfemme production company piss / CARNATION, resists giving us any easy solutions, while also making the issue at hand feel more expansive than any reductive media culture war.

Ugly Sisters is an hour-long set of vignettes ruminating on one moment in the career of the Australian feminist-turned-controversy merchant Germaine Greer: when Greer was first promoting The Female Eunuch in the 1970s, a trans woman thanked her for her work on behalf of “us girls”, sparking a vitriolic 1989 article “On Why Sex Change Is A Lie” and a host of subsequent transphobic comments.

The air is heavy with confrontation from the outset: Greer, in a T-shirt bearing the transphobic dogwhistle “Adult Human Female”, her face a potent mixture of defiance and shaky vulnerability, stares down a writhing figure clad only in voluminous green taffeta, nipple tassels, and tangled hair extensions. All at once, the feminist establishment is a hostile force against transfemininity, yet is also threatened itself by the new interpretations of womanhood before its eyes.

In the script, the figure confronting Greer is known as “Flapping Draperies”, one of many direct Greer quotations about the physical appearance of the trans woman she encountered. This is a visually arresting show (that green taffeta dress is just the beginning of an ambitious number of costume changes), one that is preoccupied with the physicality and cosmetic presentation of transness, with the tension between wearing femininity like a costume and being at one with one’s own trans body.

Both these characters are portrayed by trans women (writers Charli Cowgill and Laurie Ward), and there’s a sense here that these are not specific characters, but personifications of trans joy, the constructed trans bogeyman, and everything in between. Germaine Greer herself is a fully rounded character, a jaded writer ambivalent about being a woman and about her intellectual legacy, and the wide-eyed, optimistic depictions of transness she sees around her both expand and contradict her worldview.

Both performers skip in and out of identities (both Cowgill and Ward play Greer at different points in the show), and leap wildly between tones – at one point, an eye-wateringly tense panel discussion with Greer segues into a ritualistic murder, and then a sombre reflection on trans readings of Greer’s work (“I wanted to be your sister,” laments the speaker). This seldom feels jarring, though: like transness itself, the show is multifaceted, and able to refract its subject matter through any lens.

Cowgill and Ward have a lot of ideas here, and not all of them quite land – several instances of audience participation tip the show slightly too far into farce. While there’s a undercurrent of erotic energy between Greer and the personification of transness throughout, when the two characters’ sexual connection becomes explicit, a subtle mediation on trans sexuality turns into a lovers’ quarrel lacking in nuance. While the soundtrack is fantastic (queer hyperpop artists like SOPHIE and Slayyyter abound) and both Cowgill and Ward move in a compellingly animalistic way, certain dance interludes feel gratuitous.

Ugly Sisters could do with a tighter edit and a more cohesive framework for its myriad of often contradictory thoughts on transness. Still, its philosophical basis is very sound: audience members cis and trans will come away reflecting on what femininity means to them, and whether it’s a blessing, a curse, or (most likely) somewhere in between.

Ugly Sisters plays at Soho Theatre until 12 July