★★★★☆
Chloe Petts is funny. She has funny bones. She’s as smart at handling mishaps in the room — the house lights that won’t go down, the bloke in the front row who inadvertently insults her — as she is at unfurling her own issues as a football-loving gay woman who sometimes gets misgendered.
And I mention the F-word — funny — only because Petts’s first full-length show, Transience, sees her skipping lightly into terrain that isn’t always an easy laugh. Gender politics. Yet, for the most part, she does it with a deft touch and keeps it personal to her experience as a woman who came to understand her sexuality better in her late teens.
Hence the picture she shares of her aged 16, with a clutch bag, pink dress and prom-style hairdo. Her friends still enjoy teasing her about how it contrasts with the amiably bullish persona she plies now, in shapeless dark clothes, claiming she is the “alpha male” in most rooms. She talks about the “male privilege” she has experienced as someone good at football, the energy she gave off as a “child geezer” and itemises, brilliantly, the different body language she gets from men pushing past her in pubs depending on whether they think she’s male or female.
She gives the impression of winging it, but she has some telling turns of phrase: the big bloke who won’t get out of her way on the pavement “looks like he’s made of assorted meats”. And she can be hilarious about the pitfalls of good intentions: the squirmingly pleading horror, say, of people who suddenly realise they’ve misgendered her.
Yes, for all her delectably fast-thinking self-assurance, this is a first show: it goes off like a rocket, then loses a bit of focus later on. Her analysis of the culture wars can be shallow: whatever you think about the idea of women-only spaces — and Petts adroitly expands our understanding of the issues she faces — it doesn’t slot as neatly as she suggests into left v right, good v bad. Does JK Rowling get labelled in passing as a transphobe here? She does.
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Mostly, though, Petts stays away from slogans and jargon. She keeps things light, anecdotal, inclusive, occasionally irked but rarely adamant. Oh, and more often than not . . . funny. She’ll go far.
To January 7 (sohotheatre.com), then touring to June 17, chloepetts.org
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