Review: Cerys Bradley

Cerys Bradley, photo by Steve Ullathorne

Suddenly at the sharp end of topicality, with the Rugby Football Union having only last month recommended a ban on transgender women playing the female game in England, Cerys Bradley, who identifies as non-binary, delivers a debut hour on rugby and belonging that's affecting and routinely entertaining.

From the very start of their show, a voiceover shares their inner monologue, modifying and subverting what they're relating at the microphone. Disclosing the comic's deepest insecurities about their place in the world, it's also the internalised summary of all the prejudice and micro-aggressions they experience as someone forced into adapting their identity – by the rigorously defined rules of sports and rather less so, but no less insidiously, the policing of gendered toilets.

Despite a professed aversion to sport and the blokeish atmosphere that often surrounds it, Bradley has always hankered after the team inclusion of “lads, lads, lads”, binding the biological femininity signifiers of their breasts to play rugby and trepidatiously joining their club on their pub crawl. Factoring in their autism too, Bradley brings the trained observational eye of an insider-outsider to the macho world they've chosen to inhabit, wryly pointing out where they struggle to fit in. The raw, personal feeling they successfully convey is worth a thousand culture war column inches.