Otherland: A deeply moving examination of womanhood

Telegraph

21-02-2025

The thorny question at the heart of Otherland, Chris Bush's new play at the Almeida, is 'who'd be a woman?' The play doesn't try to offer pat answers to a question of such magnitude. One of its two main protagonists happens to be a transgender woman and, although the audience gains insights into the challenges this entails, gender reassignment isn't its overarching thrust.
What Otherland does offer is a thoughtful and ultimately moving examination of womanhood and its implications – personal, familial, romantic and societal – in a world lacking gender parity and full of stereotypical expectations. This is a play that is interested in the choices and restrictions that women face and what is sacrificed in the name of love and self-determination.
Bush, whose previous works include the Olivier-winning Standing at the Sky's Edge and Tony! The Blair Musical, is a transgender woman herself and is adamant about not wanting to be the poster child for transgender theatre. She achieves this by cleverly framing womanhood around the needs and desires of two very different characters. When the play begins, Jo, a cisgender woman is getting married to Harry (then Henry) who, unbeknown to Jo, is unhappy with the body they were born in and wants to live as a woman.
Eventually, Harry levels with Jo and initially, it seems their relationship will survive this seismic emotional reordering. But five years later, the marriage has broken down.
The rupture sends both of them on very distinct paths of self-discovery. Jo has to contend with her aversion towards having children when she meets new love Gabby who is desperate to be a mother. Harry has to negotiate her family reducing her transition to 'a distraction', tolerate the asinine things people say about her decision and learn, like many women have to, how to safely fend off the unsolicited attention of creepy men.
Veering between narration and enactment on Fly Davis' sparely designed stage – where a simple rearrangements of chairs denote the tiers of Machu Picchu, a doctor's surgery or the prow of a ship – Otherland is remarkably compressed storytelling, squeezing great swathes of time into mere minutes. It's never disorientating because composer Jennifer Whyte's live band punctuates the timeline succinctly. In fact, the music works multiple duties here by heightening emotions, moving the story forward, containing the poetry and counterpointing the beautiful singing in close harmonies by the eight-strong female cast.
Just before the interval, there is a choreographed moment that illustrates director Ann Yee's clarity of vision, where Jo and Harry's journeys elide metaphorically over their very different concerns about hormones. In the second half, the production leans into the poetic tendencies of Bush's language in surreal scenes that clearly pay homage to Guillermo Del Toro's The Shape of Water.
My one small gripe is that the play is a little long, but that can be forgiven because this close study of the many complexities in the wide variety of female lives and identities serves as an affecting plea for connection and understanding.