51 Comments

Great review! Definitely one to miss! The mental gymnastics are hard enough to contend with on social media without being face to face in the theatre with this reality denying nonsense.

Interesting point about the serious subject of women’s vulnerability “what it felt like for an actual woman to walk the streets in fear of male violence”.

The person who was once my son-in-law and is the father to my grandchildren had the gall to say to my face that he “now knew how it felt to be a woman.” This was after he had paraded his six and a half foot, well built self, through an area of Glasgow (which no one in their right mind would wander after dark) while dressed in a wig and a skirt on his way to a concert.

He was being so brave and stunning (in his mind’s eye). His first outing as his true self and what a buzz it must’ve been to experience the very real vulnerability of being a woman, alone, at night walking through a big park area.

I’ve never been able to get past that. The look on his stupid, eyeliner stained face the next day, telling me this and expecting that I would think how brave he is and that he’s really a woman now that he’s had this rite of passage.

No man can ever know how vulnerable a woman feels, walking alone at night.

How utterly misogynistic and insulting to suggest otherwise. ARR🤬

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How confusing for your grandchild, and upsetting for you. Sorry for your situation, awful.

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There's often a fine line between fear and excitement. Some people interpret butterflies in the stomach before a big night out with lots of strangers , or a career defining speech in front of 100 people as excitement for what's in store, others feel the same feeling as crippling nerves and anxiety.

That's not the case at all here. No-one can doubt for one second that what you describe was an excited man, thrilled by the idea of rape and submission, making a show of himself as a desire to be seen and recognised as a sex object.

It's a situation where I believe just about any woman would feel the exact opposite. Genuine fear, the only desire being to disappear and hide so as not be visible to predatory men.

Whatever he tells himself, it's probably the single moment of his life where he has had the least empathy with and similarity to women.

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A physically capable man will never know what it is like to know that around 80% of men (depending on the woman's strnegth), can over power you if they wish to. I had a male relative "explain" to me that it was right that it was hard to bring rapists to trial because (apparently) it would be much harder for a man to move on if he was falsely accussed while a woman could "just get over it" once it was over. I informed him that for the woman being forcibly invaded by a male body was something women never really got over. They have to live with it for the rest of their life.

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We feel your pain. So sorry about what has happened to your family.

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Well done to you for keeping your temper with him. Exlax is good, in coffee, so I hear... (chuckle).

Honestly, he needs to grow up and be an adult, not pretending to be a selfish teenager, going along with this cult. They'd have had to escort me out of this play, as I'd have been raging all the way through. Good review though. Got the heating engineer here at present, he's worried sick about his grandchildren and what they're being told. I suggested he finds out, and fast...Seems to me that many are now at Tinderbox Level about Transworld, and soon, the KABOOOOOM! will go off. I 've also told him that The Good Men & Women True are on the case, fighting to protect children and women from this horror.

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It's the same with the "we need into the shelters and crisis centres..." mob. Mate, no man will touch you with a bargepole and you're well capable of handing yourself in a fight anyway.

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Sounds like utter drivel. Glad I missed it, but thanks for the review!

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We should just remove women from the stage completely and only cast men in all the roles. Oh wait…

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So Art imitates Life in this instance.

By accident, a woman character was played by a 'man in a dress' pretty much like every Transwomen. And like life, the performance wasn't convincing.

Wonder if any of the audience 'got it'?

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Terry Johnson ha! He was knocking about the drama dept at my uni in the 90’s. He chose a play to direct where all the cast (students) had to get starkers. I avoided him like the plague.

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That's a great review!

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Everything about this sounds intentionally precision tooled to be a peaking device. Even the non-binary guy standing in sounds like something they do every night to confound people who think it's a reasonable way to treat an actress, to replace her with an obvious bloke.

Whether it's a piss take or a slap in a face, it sounds like it's approaching the right impact on audiences. They should be laughing if it's done well, but squirming and cringing is the next best thing.

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I wondered if the repalcement was staged too.

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It sounds very staged, a cheap, clumsy ploy to pursue a particular agenda and undermine women in the audience and women in general.

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of course

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I too wondered if the substitute stunt was in fact a regular part of the show. One gets very cynical!

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it's not cynicism, it's realism.

The last play I went to in the West End was unbelievable. It was a random choice. A bad choice. The 'play' came over as a transgender church service. Pink and blue lighting too. There was even a moment with a direct address to the audience to 'support our trans siblings.'

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That was my thought aswell. The writter could be trolling his audience here.

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But it can’t have been a one off emergency, can it? Because a normal chap, possibly even a non binary ( which I thought meant not either gender) wouldn’t have a dress and thigh boots which fitted his masculine frame. I’m presuming that thé possibly mythical, possibly just can’t take any more of this nonsense original actress is not the same size and shape as the stand in. And if it was a ‘real’ stand in ,it would have at least shaved, to try and offer a little illusion.

tIt’s a fix.

( that s the autocorrect gremlin, but it’s so apt I m leaving it).

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Also, how usual is it for an assistant director - not an understudy actor - to stand in for an actor? Maybe in the old days of rep, but nowadays? What's the Equity rule on this? Whole thing sounds like a nightmare episode of "The Play That Goes Wrong."

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How many ‘assistant directors ‘ does the average show in a small ‘fringe’ theatre employ ? What is their job on going once the ‘show’ is on, and who does it if they are prancing about in ‘costume’?

The cast list btw shows four women ( self defined on their web/Twitter) four men (ditto) and the fragrant Pooya. So that leaves one woman left over anyway…..

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The show must go on! ;-)

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: ) "I'm Chris, the non-binary die-rec-tor"

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Yep, exactly what I thought. It's part of the performance.

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Could be. Although, generally, there are stand-in-actors just in case anyone gets sick. Of course, they have their own costumes.

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Other actresses are available, pet

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Well, whoever stands in needs to know the part, too.

Whether spontaneous or not, there still is the fact that a man was designated as at least a stand in for a woman character.

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Exactly. And on low budget plays the stand in would be the same build so the same costume could be used.

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I thought that about the clothes - especially the boots. But maybe that's his everyday wear...

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Very apt 😂

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Fantastic review, shame the play wasn’t!

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Great to see someone with some sense of reality processing this garbage that tries to pass as serious theatre. What utter rubbish we are expected to accept. Rotten Tomato isn’t enough.

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Ah well... According to the woke, you are only supposed to cast characters with actors of the same "identity". So, "transwomen" can only be played by men who think of themselves as women. But having a woman character played by a man is fine, apparently.

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I'm with Tumble Bug--you lost me at "sex party." Possibly Graham could come up with a fall-off-your-seat laughing parody. Did everyone hear about the lefty who's upset with Dylan Mulvaney for taking a glamorous, ridiculously expensive vaykay in Bora Bora? I absolutely delight in thinking of my cross-dressing ex-husband's reaction to The Dylan.

Here's a bit of nature to work for the recovery from all this canned frosting:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RIYLytD8Ctc

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Thanks for the review. Really great insights. It sounds completely mindbending in the worst possible way. Almost makes you afraid to go to the theatre!

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About this play, the message for me is that it shows this is all one huge mind fuck, just like trans ideology. Hopefully it will help people see that.

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That was a delightfully funny read - especially as the subject matter is deadly earnest. Thanks for taking one for the team - x

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The critics say it’s four star, but the booking site shows tickets for every night but one as ‘widely available’. You can fool some of the people some of the time….

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