The first fatal mistake was to have the character deride the format of reality TV shows.
The blurby bit
Ella’s just been evicted from tawdry reality show ‘The Enbyist Enby’, where non-binary people are pitted against each other for the chance to win a gender recognition certificate.
Forced into a process of self-discovery, she has to come to terms with her feelings about her life, her gender non-conformity and her queer-ish relationship – all under the glare of the studio lights, and the interrogation of an unfeeling interviewer. On the brink of infamy, will Ella redeem herself by baring her soul to the public live on tv? Will she make everything worse? Or just try to distract us with a dance routine?
A conversation-changing satire investigating what we can and can’t say about gender when we know we’re being watched. It’s everything you never knew you wanted to know about being non-binary – and then more.
WINNER of the Sean Meehan Award for representing LGBT+ identities in theatre.
From King’s Head Theatre listing
My God.
I can’t believe this won an award. The premise was a good one I thought, albeit a bit hackneyed. The execution, however, atrocious. This was a one enby show in which our hero-nary, Ella, explains why they are authentically non-binary, despite not having the requisite blue hair and mismatched jumble sale clothes.
The first fatal mistake was to have the character deride the format of reality TV shows. There were many such incongruent moments, so it’s not like we could believe for a moment that Ella was vulnerable enough to succumb to the whims of exploitative TV execs and suitably enough we learnt nothing about the recruitment process or the story leading up to such a doomed decision. So, no inciting incident then. The end plot twist revealed that she wasn’t really conducting an exit interview with Big Brother, but voicing her own thoughts to us, which could have been funny, if it hadn’t been quite so chronic.
Thus, the entire format of the show was nothing more than a lame excuse for her to directly harangue the audience for an hour, inarticulating what non-binary is. (In her case, this was something to do with sharing a womb with an eventually miscarried twin brother and if she’d bothered to consult Mr Google, like myself, she would have found out this normally results in resorption, a much more persuasive detail, so we can add ‘utterly witless’ to the list of insults.)
The thrust of her diatribe was this: Why can’t I, a pretty feminine female, continue ‘presenting’ as a pretty feminine female and be considered non-binary? In other words, it was a tirade against all us ‘normies’, who use visual clues to determine someone’s sex and possibly what someone’s made-up gender identity might be. Ella did try to make it satirical though, she really did, taking a cheap dig at JK Rowling. This consisted of a mocked up tweet of Rowling deriding Ella’s participation in the ‘tawdry reality show’. Rowling had tweeted #enbyorphoney and thought Ella was the latter, which had bought all sorts of misery to Ella’s door. (Incidentally, a twitter search at the time of writing reveals that Rowling has never tweeted the words ‘non-binary’, appears to have no interest in reality TV, nor had the hashtag ever been used, so again zero relevant context.)
Listening to someone sound off for an hour about their personal peccadilloes isn’t drama. It isn’t suspenseful. And in the case of Ella, it wasn’t at all interesting. Instead we were treated to an uncomfortable string of, what sounded like, real anecdotes, one being about her fucking a man anally with a dildo – this meant she ‘knew’ what it felt like to be a man because she too had experienced groin strain (please be reassured this is funny on paper only). Such reflections were made even more mundane by the fact that, as a beautiful woman herself, who effortlessly meets idealised feminine standards, little understanding was shown to those who are genuinely androgynous or tarred as such. She also didn’t want to be considered ‘queer’ and was deliberately evasive about whether she was just your typical hetero alphabet bag hopper or an actual practising bisexual (just for the record, I couldn’t give a shit either way). And of course, no trans-themed play is replete without delivering a mini sermon on Butlerism and this was duly met. Several times over.
On the politics of single sex spaces, it confirmed Ella a nuance-free zone. As a former fag hag herself, she had experienced humiliation and fear in the toilets at gay clubs, so she ‘got it’ when friends expressed terfy feelings. Except this situation wasn’t the same at all, because ‘women’ (meaning trans-identified males) sharing women’s spaces was just that. Phew! We can all stop worrying about that then!
I honestly think the bouncing enby from a few weeks ago was more entertaining and intellectually rigorous but there really is something about these women, desperately seeking to be sternly told off.
The venue
The King’s Head Theatre had a long history of supporting drama of all sorts but since being expanded and rebuilt its focus is now on LGBTQ+ works only. Currently it appears to be surviving on donations but surely it is only a matter of time before Arts Council England bungs them a wad?
Our theatre focuses on showcasing LGBTQ+ work which explores the full spectrum of experiences symbolised by the rainbow flag. We are a home for a new wave of diverse queer theatre makers & we love to embrace stories that haven’t been told before, in ways that haven’t been invented yet.
From the King’s Head Theatre About page
The play was held in its small theatre in the basement and the audience sparse. I don’t see how a theatre can continue to exist on such meagre fare but I note that main theatre slots have already been given over to the cis het normies. Viva the alphabet bag! Eh?
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The Lies They Tell 
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