We want to put ‘a Trans audience.’ But what is that? What does it look like? And, given how rare trans narratives, trans perspectives, and trans bodies still are on stages of every size in the UK, we have to wonder – does it even exist?
It was mid-August, 2024. We had been performing our debut show The Freemartin to a scattering of audience members night upon night, in a very small, very warm room, in the basement of what is usually a hotel. Our slot was so late that, at the quietest points in the show, we found ourselves competing with the 90’s nostalgia over-30’s club night happening in the larger theatre upstairs. So it was, in many ways, the absolutely quintessential Edinburgh Fringe experience.
The audience this night is the largest we’ve had so far – in fact the front row is entirely full, but as we spend the first moments of the show backstage (aka, behind a curtain in a cupboard), and the next few blinded by spotlights and frantically equipping wellies and flat caps, we have been finding that we actually have very little idea who’s in the audience for a considerable chunk of the show. At one point, we find ourselves playing torch-wielding trans teenagers breaking into an abandoned barn. In the darkness, one of us quips about a shirt we’re planning on wearing for sixth form. The front row suddenly erupts into laughter.
It is undoubtedly the biggest reaction that line has ever gotten. It may have been the biggest laugh we ever got, over those two, very sleep-deprived, slightly sweaty weeks. And the three of us – scattered between the audience, and the stage space, choking on fake cigarettes and effing and blinding – realise what’s happened.
They’re here. In the front row. A cluster of trans sixth formers have found their way to our agriculture-themed, late night fever dream of a show – which we had written, earlier that year, in response to the vicious policies of the at-the-time Tory government regarding trans youth. Trans youth in schools. Trans youth in healthcare systems. Trans youth in public. Trans youth in private. The trans childhoods in uneventful British towns which the three of us had. Which our producer and our operator, also sitting in that basement theatre with us on all those late nights, had both had too. Which, it seemed to us, our country was trying to methodically, and systemically eradicate.
And I mention this because anyone who has ever had the pleasure of filling out the endless funding applications, show pitches, registration documents and marketing packs that come with a making new show will have had to answer the same question a few times over – who is this for? And the classic theatre wisdom is that you should know your audience. You should be very clear who you’re making it for, and how you get it in front of them. But we found ourselves struggling to answer this a lot. We want to put ‘a Trans audience.’ But what is that? What does it look like? And, given how rare trans narratives, trans perspectives, and trans bodies still are on stages of every size in the UK, we have to wonder – does it even exist?
Our findings, from our very, very small-scale experiment, are twofold. The first is that there is a trans audience. And it’s as simple as that.
They were waiting for us in the three-person audience of our very first show, even when Fringe teething issues and power outages meant it started forty-five minutes later than expected. They were the familiar faces from our own lives who came along to support us. They were the faces that became familiar too – who despite the unbelievable, overwhelming variety of shows available in every strange venue like ours throughout August in Edinburgh, came back to ours to see it again. They brought their friends. They brought their parents. Sometimes they chatted to us afterwards. Sometimes we never saw them again outside of the brief fifty-minutes we spent in front of them, in a stuffy basement, in our bright red wellies. Some of them, probably, filtered the show available by ‘trans’ – exactly what we’ve done at countless other fringe festivals. Maybe some of them saw our Instagram. Maybe a few of them knew, upfront, what a freemartin is, and that alone tipped them off. We have no idea. But we were so, incredibly happy, and relieved, to see them. Again, and again, and again. Our other finding, though, is that transness and cisness are not opposing forces. It is not that trans audience members ‘get it’, and cis audience members ‘don’t’. There are not two ways of attempting to describe the complex experience of having a body. Of living in a society that has created gender. Of figuring this whole weird thing out. And the things that are scaring us, now, as trans people – the increasing treatment of our own bodies as things which are useful or useless, the politicisation of childhood, and the erasure and eradication of biological variety, diversity and inefficiency – are scaring people of every other experience too. Trans issues do not exist in a vacuum. And neither does trans liberation.
We wrote the show about this. And the incredible audiences who have come along to see it so far have proved it.
But, anyway, The Freemartin is just a show about agriculture.
We promise.
Sun 15 March at 9pm
Tickets £8 - £12
