Otherland at the Almeida review: Saccharine and melodramatic
Otherland | Almeida | ★★☆☆☆
Chris Bush’s best-known play to date, Standing at the Sky’s Edge, divided opinion at Morning Wire. I found this strange musical about a Sheffield housing estate to be quite charming, if a little twee, while my colleague, reviewing the West End transfer, hated it with every fibre of her being.
Having watched Bush’s new play, Otherland at the Almeida, I’m starting to suspect my colleague was right.
Otherland follows the parallel lives of Harri, a trans woman dealing with the societal and familial fallout of her transition, and her ex-wife Jo, a bisexual woman whose new (female) partner is desperate to have children. Through them, Bush asks what it means to be a woman. Is it your sex assigned at birth? The ability (and desire) to procreate? Or something else? (Clue: it’s something else).
The first half flits through scenes from Jo and Harri’s lives: their marriage, their break-up, their conversations with friends, their arguments with family. All the while a chorus of supplementary characters fizz around them, often breaking into song (the songs being the theatrical equivalent of a highlighter pen, underscoring the play’s themes in a way that verges on patronising).
Bush writes the main players – with the exception of Harri’s mother – as an affable and likeable bunch and this results in a play with virtually no dramatic tension. I guess the idea is that the tension is within us all, that even – or especially – the kindest people suffer. But it doesn’t make for riveting theatre.
Neither does it help that, before the interval, the action takes place on an entirely bare stage. There’s nowhere to hide and this script needs all the help it can get.
Things are partly remedied in the second half, when the centre of the round stage is revealed to be a paddling pool. Here Bush swings… and misses. But at least she swings. The two strands of the play become a trans retelling of The Elephant Man, in which a mermaid-like creature gets caught up in a fishing net before shedding her scales and finding a new home on terra firma; and a sci-fi rumination on robotic surrogate mothers. Subtle it is not.
Otherland is the kind of play you desperately want to like. It foregrounds marginalised voices and is clearly written from a place of hard-won personal experience (Bush is trans, although she says this isn’t autobiographical). But it’s a play with two gears: boring and daft, forever gravitating towards the saccharine and the melodramatic, eventually drowning in a paddling pool of good intentions.