ADAM - Play Review
While entering the Grand Hall of the Battersea Arts Centre’s, where the play took place, the lights were already very low, the stage was clear and on its underneath there were piles of feminine and masculine dismembered mannequin bodies. The mood was dark but not scary.
There was smoke surrounding the room and blurring the shapes of all objects. Maybe the blurry environment was based on his fear and doubts, but I also like to believe it was to remind us that our value it’s not based on our physicality, or that all kinds of bodies have value.
We had a British Sign Language interpreter sitting on a corner of the stage, and it was announced it was a relaxed performance, allowing the public to move or leave when wanted. The play was about tolerance and inclusion, and it started with a woman singing in Arab, and a spotlight on a woman trying to find the courage to cut one breast out.
Although the tragic start and story, we were safe that everything went well because Adam was there playing of himself, telling us the story of his own journey from woman to man, from Egypt to Glasgow.
He was born in a body he never felt belonging, in a conservative middle east society, without internet to search for information or nobody close who would hear his dilemma without judgement.
Since a very young age, Adam never coped with the way of ‘how girls should behave’, and never had someone who he could really be himself with. Rehanna, the woman who started the play and embodied his past body, his mother and his work colleague, is wearing the same clothes as Adam and take us to a better understanding of the struggle with his identity, his heritage and his country.
Both actors had a brilliant strong presence and with the help of sound, videos and a clever minimal set, that opened and revealed props from the floor, they took us to all this different places and memories. From his childhood moments when he prefered playing ‘Lord of the Rings’ instead of wearing dresses, and his struggle with growing up as a woman should, to his job in a clothing shop.
The mood was still quite dark and all the characters represented on the big screen were unclear shadows with twisted voices, that transmitted us fear and violence. One of these silhouettes was his clothing shop employer, who discovered Adam kissing his colleague, and raped him with the threat of handling them to the police, that in Egypt torture homosexuals til death.
Not even the colleague who he become intimate with, was supportive or comprehensive because she didn’t want to take the risk of being discovered as a lesbian and tortured by the authorities.
He didn’t consider himself as homosexual but the news was spread and he had to runaway his own home because even his own family was threatening him, and after hiding and sleeping on the streets, he saw himself forced to leave the country for his own safety.
He found a safe home in a small room in Glasgow, and the darkness of his past nightmares of fear and hate is replaced by the light of hope at the moment he first used a laptop and internet:
‘Can a soul of a man be trapped inside of a woman body?’
He didn’t have to hide in the dark anymore! As he continued his research, he found more and more people like him and even found a definition that he longed to discover: trans people.
He was not alone anymore, and his act of freedom took also the play to a more political place, since it was bolding the positive impact of the internet, that also made the ‘Arab Spring’ possible and somehow connected Adam’s revolution with his brothers and sisters revolution. Showing once again that gender or identity shouldn’t be something that put us aside our cultural heritages, and that love and freedom will always win.
The video and props used in perfect symbiosis since the beginning of the play, allowed us to follow what both actors were taping in the laptops, while the images would appear on the big screen behind them.
Adam managed to find his identity, but he was not free, yet. He found a new hazard by the need of proving to the Scottish government that he was trans. He asked for asylum, because being a trans was not allowed in his country, but he couldn’t prove he was trans before moving to Glasgow, because nobody he met in his life in Egypt was aware or could understand his identity dilemma.
Time and money were running out, while all his requests for asylum were denied, and his tiny messy room becomes the mirror of his brain. His only escape was internet and the support of the people he met there.
Adam found a last hope solution by injecting himself with testosterone, which could have saved or killed him. He was young and determined but his body was tired of fighting. Both actors took my breath away in this part of the play, due to their bold body language and trust on each other, but also the author due to the strong ability of writing and transmitting us the real fight between a body and its brain.
After surviving that torturing treatment, he bravely put himself through, Adam was finally conceded with the asylum and was finally free to dictate his own future.
He decided to try an audition in the Scottish National Theater and the director was so moved by him that decided to create this play, and in that audition, a woman showed interest to get to know Adam.
Soon they fell in love and started a relationship. Everything seemed well in Adam’s new life, but something was wrong, while he was about to present his debut play. He couldn’t bear to tell his story without telling it to his mother first, so he grabbed his laptop to have a video call with her.
After their moving chat, where true love blurred any prejudice that we are taught by society, the screen is filled with a powerful choi, and the couple joined us as watchers of the trans people choir he met online, in a leg shaking beautiful moment where we hear the lyrics ‘We are Adam, we hear you, we are one’. And the play finishes with a marriage portrait of Adam and Rehanna, which led me to tears, because Adam was living a life of freedom like everyone deserves.