FringeReview UK 2023

No I.D.

Royal Court

Genre: Biographical Drama, Film, LGBTQ+ Theatre, LGBTQIA+, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Political, Puppetry, Short Plays, Solo Show, Theatre

Venue: Royal Court Jerwood Upstairs

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

“Her Majesty’s – oh, sorry – His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs… (Easy for some).” There’s jokes as thick as the legal paper cluttering the Theatre Upstairs; jokes to celebrate struggle though, not bleak consolation. Uniquely confiding, Tatenda Shamiso brings his one-man show No I.D. from this year’s Vault Festival (it premiered last year at Theatre Peckham) to the Royal Court, directed by Sean Ting-Hsuan Wang.

Transitioning to a man when you’ve four nationalities (one denying your existence) and two passports is going to be a bit challenging, Shamiso disarmingly suggests. Shamiso though also sings goodbye to all that: their bureaucracy, his dysphoria, not his former self.

And that’s the involving thing, not often acknowledged: selves that remain during transition, the self that transforms. And he’s often funny in sotto voce parentheses on that former self: the girl – child of a Zimbabwean mother, Belgian father, growing up in California. “She put J K Rowling right up there next to Jesus. (Win some, lose some).”

Duetting – and dancing – with his former self who soars a high tessitura he can no longer stretch to is a moving experience, as Shamiso harmonises a rich tenor, a small elegy for the vibrant young performer he was at drama school and later. “My voice, beautiful as it was, didn’t sound like a voice that belonged to the person I was becoming.” The recorded self he leaves behind, as with the videos – one a vlog of his transition – are continually accessed from childhood in a series of recordings projected on the backstage wall. Shamiso’s palpable delight in a voice changing, hair appearing on his stomach, his physicality, these are celebrated without a denial of who he once was, the self walking inside him too. And it’s that self Shamiso affirms he carries with him.

The spine of this hour-long show though is Shamiso’s attempts to gain the new ID flagged in the title. It’s more far difficult than having to pretend he likes Lego and prefers blue to get a dysphoria diagnosis from “Full Insane Sounding Doctor” (which spills out of a wall), as from the start the two core voices he contends with on the phone bock (Lauren Semme’s supinely bored automated voice), and the one who shifts. This is Rufus Love’s Andrew, who moves from stating “the No I.D, phoneline doesn’t exist” to staying with Shamiso right to the end and calling him “real”.

By this time the boxes around the sofa, designed by Claudia Casino, spill out the insanity of paperwork, the stage an A4-strewn-wreck. There’s a few moments of plangent lighting (Zoe Beeny) as Shamiso’s narrative drops into faux trauma.

Since, when things get difficult there’s always “Trauma Porn” – this show simply refuses solemnity, gently mocking the audience. “ but like… if you’re COMFORTABLE this is… a SAFE PLACE… You can really tell us… how WERE things at HOME?” And indeed the parents’ supportive voices are brought on, genteel suppositions are undermined. At one point he animates their voices with a couple of (pink, blue) sock-puppets. By this time Shamiso’s infectious fun lights up the whole Upstairs in a festival of laughter.

Here, humour’s not a weapon against such dark forces that increasingly lap round any safe spaces: Shamiso elegantly declines their effect. Of course they exist, but they can never define. Celebrating acceptance, being wholly comfortable in your own body for the first time in your life transmits to everyone. It should make us more comfortable, knowing how Shamiso radiates the joy of his, bestowing a kind of benediction. A quietly groundbreaking show.

Published April 29, 2023April 30, 2023 by Simon Jenner