Review: Ugly Sisters

Contrary to many solo Fringe shows, Performance Art is not merely an opportunity to drop familiar theatrical structures for an autobiographical ramble: it is a strategy to embrace subjects that erupt in violence from the artistic imagination and match the ferocity of the ideas. Piss / CARNATION are exploring the impossible relationship between Germaine Greer’s intellectual brilliance and iconic feminist importance, and her dismissive contempt for transwomen, most forcefully expressed in a conversation she had with a transwoman on the day that The Female Eunuch was published.

Far from exclusively condemning Greer’s transphobia, piss / CARNATION struggle with a loving respect for Greer’s argumentation and a disappointed hatred of her bigotry. Lurching between choreographic tussles and measured conversations, the two performers fight the competing gravities without ever dropping a sense of outrage and frustration.

While Ugly Sisters never compromises, it sets out the positions and allows them to fight: the fragmented, urgent dramaturgy coheres elegantly with the emotional turmoil, Because of the precision of the storytelling, and the identities it embraces, it feels almost trivial to add that Ugly Sisters has a resonance beyond Greer and Trans-Exclusion: but it depicts the trauma of admiring a hero who then betrays through vicious immorality.