Review by Kate Gaul
“Hyper” (a play) by Ois O'Donoghue and Jaxbanded Theatre, begins with a prologue direct to the audience. The actors establish who the play is for (not us) and who we probably are (cis, straight). It is clear who this prologue is meant to address (despite its insistence that the show is, 100%, not for us). The “us” of the prologue are the hostile and ignorant who provide questions and challenges fielded by trans people on a day-to-day basis. This is a play with music about a pair of bandmates and best mates Saorise and Conall. When Saoirse comes out and begins transitioning, the band must grapple with her changing body, voice and life. O’Donoghue sits behind a translucent curtain with 2 musicians while the audience sit in traverse with two actors.
O'Donoghue says: "I suppose for me, “Hyper” is fundamentally about the really complicated relationship trans people often have with our own voices. I think we're in a time where we're being made incredibly visible, and as a result being pressured to speak a lot and speak out a lot, which is an important thing. And I think it's interesting how that meets up with a lot of us, like, physically, fundamentally not loving the sound of our own voices, and how that can kind of mesh with that."
Much of “Hyper” focuses literally on the trans voice. Singing and music are interpolated into the acted scenes. O’Donoghue uses a vocoder as an instrument to express themselves. Vocoder and autotune have often come under fire for being 'dishonest', or for being a cheat code for vocalists of less than satisfactory quality. In hyperpop, voice editing is just another digital instrument. “For trans people, the voice can be a serious site of gender dysphoria. Some of us go through voice training and medical intervention to make sounds that are affirming to us. In cisnormative culture, the “trans voice” is a site of gendered discongruity.”
The intimate space of the Former Women’s Locker Room (seating around 25 for “Hyper”) has an intense energy across 60 minutes. We are incorporated into the performance and asked to read/yell transphobic slurs in a bathroom scene. It makes it’s point. The two actors are committed and engaging. The role of Saoirse is shared between O’Donoghue and cis actor Fiona Larmon. O’Donoghue says that the casting was born out of a desire to shield the trans body from the (re-)enactment of violence against it. "There are elements of the story where I was like, 'I would like to discuss some of the darker things that happen as a result of the voice,' but also, I don't want to enact them upon my own body, but also and upon trans bodies, because I don't like that that's how we exist in media culture… If I can put a cis body here, we can point out how both absurd it is that this happens, but we can point out that, like, 'This is the only way I see you.' I think it's more evident, then," she says.
Larmon’s presence in O’Donoghue’s place for those darker moments highlights the absurdity of transphobia; it forces us as the audience to confront what it is that we see as different between trans and cis women. In all its punk/look-at-me energy “Hyper” is challenging theatre but its challenges reverberate long after we have left that space and returned to our world. I’d say it is for us.
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