The peculiar moral panics around trans people can make you wonder if those panicking are worried they will one day wake up with a changed gender identity. Claire Dowie’s surreal satire, inspired by Kafka’s Metamorphosis, imagines the character Helen waking up one morning to find she is turning into a man.
It started with her right hand. She woke to find “it attached like a limpet to my left tit”. It said, “oh go on let me.” That’s typical of men for you. She smacked it away, noticing that it was bigger than the night before. It wasn’t the only change. Her right foot was also getting bigger and uglier like a man’s.
Not feeling up to work, she phones to say she won't be in that day. Those at the other end of the line say she sounds different. One suggests she has done a Margaret Thatcher, making her voice much more gravelly.
Shopping for food, she finds it difficult trying to shop with just her left hand, but her right hand wants to remain slouching in the coat pocket, because shopping is a woman’s job. Finding it awkward with just one hand, she gives up on that with an urge to go to B & Q and a Gardening Centre. Seeing a slug, she wonders if it is male or female, and starts to speculate on the “genderfication of vegetables”. She decides carrots are “bisexual obviously! Nonbinary. Sitting on the fence like a Lib Dem.”
As the process escalates, she claims, “my body turns on me, turns against me, attacks from within. Friendly fire. Like an American.” Things get a bit more disturbing when, back home, she finds “three people have appeared, Old Age, Regret and Despair… sipping tea.”
The audience is amused and finds lots of reasons to laugh. There is a comedic slant to the performance from the arrival of Clare Dowie in tight-fitting clothes dancing seductively to the music of Tina Turner’s "Simply the Best". Clips of other songs and dances appear from time to time. She humorously exaggerates her mannerisms as she tells her story, and occasionally changes her clothes with the odd help of a few of those sitting in the rows closest to the stage. At the end of the show, she wanders across the audience, giving everybody, individually, a high-five flat hand farewell.
The dances and the interaction with the audience don’t always contribute anything more than entertainment to the event, but the sixty-minute show with its shades of cabaret and subversive humour is always fun.
H to He (I’m turning into a Man), first performed at the Drill Hall Arts Centre, London in 2004, is one of four plays from four decades that Claire Dowie is now performing in repertoire.