Eve
★★★★
ONE of two plays the National Theatre of Scotland is premiering this Fringe about the lives of trans people, Eve is a one-woman show about the life of Jo Clifford, father, performer and writer of 91 plays. Many of these were written under the name John Clifford, and were, as she says here, written “partly to convince the world that I do have the right to exist”.
Told in Clifford’s lulling, gentle, sing-song voice while she shows photographs from significant moments of her life, it’s sedate in comparison to Adam, the dynamic story of a young Egyptian trans man’s journey to Scotland and to the male body he knew he should be in since infanthood. That’s perhaps appropriate for a woman of Clifford’s 67 years, but also for what the play essentially is – a love letter and mark of respect to John, to the deeply uncomfortable man Clifford was for much of her life.
Much of this show is testimony, a relaying of personal experience as a political act, in a similar way that second-wave feminists of the 1970s thought it vital to do work which “conscious-raised” and bore witness to lives otherwise ignored. It was with the feminist writer and journalist Susan Innes that Clifford shared 33 years of her life with, a woman, Clifford says, who “needed me as a man”. A sequence on Innes, who died in 2006, is particularly affecting, as is a portrait of Clifford in his 50s looking just as awkward, melancholic and kind as the young boy staring into the camera at military school.
Though there’s anger here, certainly, Eve is more about saying goodbye to John, of paying tribute to him for living through his pain and managing to love though it.
Until Aug 27 (not 21), Traverse (V15), Edinburgh, various times, £19.50, £14.50 and £9.50 concs.
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