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by Stacey Gregg, directed by Brenley Charkow

Bustle & Beast with Blarney Productions, Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto

November 16-December 2, 2018

Kes: “We all need someplace where we can speak in capital letters”

If one purpose of drama is to help people see the world from a different perspective than their own, then Scorch by Northern Irish playwright Stacey Gregg is fantastically successful.  If you have ever wondered what the world looks like to a young transgender person, Scorch, acted so sympathetically by trans non-binary performer Julie “Niuboi” Ferguson, is a real eye-opener.  Scorch not only tells a riveting story but spreads understanding about an often misunderstood segment of society.

Scorch premiered at the 2015 Outburst Queer Arts Festival in Belfast and went on to win an Edinburgh Fringe First Award in 2016 among many others.  The play is inherently metatheatrical in that it is presented as a play by Kes (Ferguson).  Kes, after a series of joyful and miserable experiences, now feels strong enough to present themself to the world.  Kes chooses their name from the title of a 1969 film by Ken Loach.  Kes has never seen the film but identifies with the picture of the boy on the cover of the video. 

Kes tells us how, ever since their youth, they have always identified with boys’ things and the male point of view even though aware that they are physically female.  All the avatars Kes would choose when playing video games would be male.  Ryan Gosling is their favourite actor, not because they want to be his girlfriend but because they want to be him. 

As a result of online gaming, Kes meets a girl named Jules.  The two find out their non-gaming identities and begin corresponding by texting.  Jules is the one who pushes for the two to Skype which encourages Kes to study more closely how boys speak and act, even though the question of gender has not come up.  Kes knows they and Jules have fallen in love but when Jules presses further to meet in person, Kes rather comically studies teenaged male fashion in order to look right.  Though all this Kes says repeatedly that Kes’s goal is to be the best boyfriend possible to Jules.  And this even includes, surprisingly enough, having sex which Kes accomplishes with the aid of a chest bandage and a highly detailed dildo.

Tension builds since we know that a confrontation or revelation will have to happen sometime.  What will take many aback is that this reckoning takes the form of a legal action initiated against Kes by Jules’s mother.  Kes is 17 and Jules is 16.  What form could this action possibly take?  As it happens Gregg was inspired to write her play by an actual court case against a transgender person in the UK in 2013.  In the actual case the defendant was not a naive participant as is Kes and the outcome of the case was very different.  Yet, the important fact is that legal action against a transgender teen has happened and has done so more than once.

Fortunately, Kes has understanding parents and already belongs to a therapy group where Kes can share Kes’s distress.  What is most enlightening is to realize that Kes is not the kind of person many have heard of who feels trapped in the wrong body.  Kes is unhappy they can’t pee while standing up and did not welcome the appearance of breasts, but Kes is otherwise happy with the body they have and doesn’t want surgery in order physically to become a different sex.  Kes also does not feel like a lesbian even though Kes is portrayed as such during her court case.  She is happy to discover the term “boi” as a way of identifying themself as a genderqueer or nonbinary person and is pleased to find there are many other bois out there in the world.  Kes is such a delight as person because Kes is so innocent and optimistic.  Long before and long after her ordeal, Kes states, “Life is so awesome it just makes you want to laugh”.   

Julie “Niuboi” Ferguson owns the role of Kes to such an extent that you have that rare experience in the theatre of forgetting almost immediately that the performer is acting at all.  Ferguson conveys the myriad doubts and confusions, the bliss and despair of Kes with completely unaffected naturalness even though the play itself is non-naturalistic.  Ferguson shifts among various encounters with people with a simple alteration of posture and gesture.  More than that, when Kes encounters feelings too difficult to express in words, Gregg has Kes dance them out, a skill in which Ferguson also excels. 

Alison Yanota’s production design is deceptively simple.  She has a very thin plastic screen hanging at the back of the TPM Backspace stage leaving the surrounding exposed bricks as they are.  There are five chairs on stage on which sit three transparent mannequins  These represent Kes’s therapy group.  Inside of each a bare lightbulb glows as if to suggest, as does the entire play, that it is what is inside a person that counts. 

Hidden in the back screen and in what looks like a white tape to demarcate the stage perimeter are LED light strips that can change colour depending on the drift of Kes’s story.  Overall, Yanota’s lighting design is extraordinarily varied and far more complex than is normally the case for a solo show.

With such a story, such a performer, such a design and such incisive yet nearly invisible direction from Brenley Charkow, Scorch is an engaging, mind-expanding play that gives you an exciting lift as if the experience had helped you make the leap from ignorance to knowledge.  This is what the best theatre can do.  Especially at a time when trans right are under threat, this production of Scorch is not to be missed             

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Julie “Niuboi” Ferguson as Kes; Julie “Niuboi” Ferguson as Kes. ©2018 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets, visit https://ca.patronbase.com/_ArtsBoxOffice/Productions