Edinburgh Festival, review, Adam / Eve: Honest first-person testimony from transgender people

The National Theatre of Scotland present a pair of plays which explore the experience of transgender people in the 21st century, performed by the people whose stories are being told

Neshla Caplan and Adam Kashmiry in 'Adam' at the Edinburgh Festival

It’s an incredible coup on the part of the National Theatre of Scotland to be able to present such a unique diptych at this year’s Edinburgh festival; a pair of plays which don’t just explore the experience of transgender people in the 21st century, but which are actually performed by the people whose stories are being told. These are no pale recreations, but honest first-person testimony, and should be essential viewing for anyone with an interest in the experiences being related.

Adam is the more theatrical of the plays. It tells the tale of Adam Kashmiry, a young man discovered by the play’s director Cora Bissett (creator of the Glasgow Girls musical and the recent stage adaptation of the book Room) as he gave a short monologue about his life at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, in an event organised by the Scottish Refugee Council.

Born a female in Egypt, Adam relays his own experience in the lead role, telling of life as a second class citizen; first as a female in his home country, then – after a personal revelation inspired by contacts made around the world online – as a transgender man who dare not reveal himself in Egypt, and finally as an asylum seeker in Glasgow, assailed by a system which doesn’t understand the nuance of his being and why that means he can’t go home.

Although the story is Adam’s own, it has been scripted by playwright Frances Poet, with Neshla Caplan supporting onstage as Adam’s female self and in various other roles. The technical aspects are particularly striking, including Emily James’ set, a large marbled platform which hides props and locations; choreographer Janis Claxton’s vivid movement design; and the ‘Adam World Choir’, a chorus of webcam-broadcast transgender voices from around the world creating a striking, eerie accompaniment to Jocelyn Pook’s soundtrack.

We feel Adam’s pain and fear, and his welcome sense of release at the end, although Kashmiry succeeds in this big-stage role more because of his honesty and immersion in his own story rather than due to an emphatic acting capacity. More experienced on the stage is Jo Clifford, an acclaimed Scottish playwright for three decades and more, often under her previous name John Clifford, and the star of the well-received one-woman show The Gospel According to Jesus Queen of Heaven.

In her solo piece Eve, co-written with Chris Goode and directed by Susan Worsfold, Clifford simply relates her life story, from gentle, boyish years in a rough boarding school environment to marriage, fatherhood and dawning realisation of who she really wanted to be in later life. Any sense that simply sitting and telling one’s own story – no matter how extraordinary – is a bit of a cheat is dispelled by Clifford’s hypnotic and resonantly honest manner in this gorgeous, immersive tale.