Ah, the lure of the silver screen! Close Up starts with slow motion, Black and white film of diving and tumbling bodies, enormous limbs and torsos travelling across the large screen to the rear of the performance space, which is set up dance-style at floor level – no staging, tiered seats rising up on three sides. Real live bodies enter from around and behind the screen, unlit other than by the light of the screen, crossing the stage in low rolls and dives and scuttles.

The onscreen images dissolve and instead a spotlight highlights a man in a black suit and white shirt, wearing black and white spats. His silhouette is cast upon the screen in the full moon circle of the spotlight. The tone shifts, the man speaks. He introduces himself: he’s Dan from Melba, and he’s a hand-balancer. He proves this with a very beautiful and skilled hand-balancing sequence. And adds a dash of the Donnie Darko theme on guitar…

The four performers take turns on the mic, reciting a litany of action verbs ‘to jump, to tumble, to rock, to roll’ as they leap and fly across the floor. They run into the audience with their mics, chatting and flirting with audience members – getting close to people, you could say. Lauren is close to me, sitting on a man’s lap, having a photo taken with him. When she’s not seducing people, she’s challenging the feminine stereotype by basing not one not two but three other people, or by performing a stunningly strong corde lisse act – the free-hanging rope being more closely associated with male performers, women traditionally going for silks or trapeze. The other two performers on stage and screen are Lewie who is an ace hula-hooper, amongst other talents, and Todd, who is a Chinese Pole performer. The show is punctuated with autobiographical details, and a kind of demystifying of processes: ‘This is one of those moments called a transition, when we need to put up the Chinese Pole’ says Todd ‘ So I’m going to put on my Pole clothes, which I need to protect me from skin burns… but this jumper is just an ordinary jumper, from H&M I think. They’re not sponsoring us…’ He then moves into a breathtaking, perfectly times Chinese Pole act.

Elsewhere, we get more evidence of the extraordinary skills and acts we’ve come to expect from Circa. My favourite section starts with a row of chairs. There’s a lovely playful scene as four people are brought up from the audience to sit upright and still as the four performers move around and over them and the chairs, a beautiful exploration of what it is to perform and what it is to witness, to really look. Then, each performer takes his or her audience partner by the hand and invites them into a gentle waltz. All lovely stuff. Partners are returned to their seats, and the chairs continue to play their part, becoming a great tower climbed up and balanced on – a great merging of object manipulation and equilibrist skills.

Meanwhile, we return now and again to the screen. There’s close-ups of taut stomachs beaten percussively with fists, and a kind of time-lapsed animation of Lewie hooping, as live she takes more and more colourful hoops onto her gyrating body.

Close Up is a show about the gaze; about looking from near and from far; about seeing and being seen. But dramaturgically speaking, it’s not quite there yet. Of course the skills are amazing – this is Circa, world leaders in contemporary circus. And much of the content of the piece is in place, and interesting. Many of the set pieces incorporated are really beautiful, and I love the play with audience, the exploration of ‘near’ and ‘far’.  I’m not so keen on the confessional-autobiographical moments, nor on the deconstructing commentary on circus. Both of these things have been done better by others. The main criticism, though, is of the film work, which seems so crucial to the content of Close Up – the gaze, the mediated image – yet is just not that interesting, for the most part. I suppose we are all so used to slow-mo action and close-ups of acrobats’ or dancers’ body parts used in advertising that it takes something radically different to really grab our attention. That said, the ending  – which involves the screen – is wonderful!

I suppose I am also, in my criticisms, influenced by the experience of seeing two of these four performers very recently in the other Circa show that premiered this year: What Will Have Been, which even on the occasion of its premiere was so wonderful, so perfectly formed, that it would be beyond all reason if director Yaron Lifschitz and the ensemble could have pulled off a second perfect show within a few months. I am also reminding myself that I had reservations about Circa’s Beyond on its first outing, and on seeing it a second and third time over two years watched it evolve into one of the best-ever Circa shows. The note here is that with Circa, as with all of us, some shows arrive almost fully formed on their first outings, everything slipping into place effortlessly; and with other shows there is a longer gestational process before the piece is at its best. This is the premiere of an adventurous show, involving a number of elements beyond the regular circus tool-box (moving image, spoken text, audience participation) and it will grow and grow, I am sure.

Of course, even a work-in-progress from Circa is heads above most circus shows out there. The full house of Underbelly’s big purple cow on the opening night of the Fringe is ecstatic to have been invited into this very special world of supreme talent and stimulating ideas, and gives the fab four performers the ovation they deserve.

The politics of gender – and specifically transgender issues – are a hot potato right now. There’s a lot of media attention on high-profile transgender women – Caitlyn, Kellie – with endless interviews, articles, speculations and pronouncements from the women themselves and from their family, friends and enemies. Meanwhile, within the tight enclaves of radical feminism, there’s something of a raging battle between some so-called cis-women (women born as women who choose to identify as women) and some transgender women (not all of whom accept that label), about issues such as the terminology used to describe people, who is the most oppressed, and whose needs are greater. Too often the arguments are limiting, the assumptions made unhelpful… Some have wondered whether the feminist agenda is being hijacked by people who are coming from a position of male privilege and thus used to dominating the conversation and getting their own way. It is with some wariness that I – who define myself as a feminist and who as a child rejected my assigned female gender, becoming a ‘tomboy’ who was delighted when the local shopkeepers called her ‘sonny’ –  enter the affray.  So this is the baggage I’m carrying on this subject as I enter the theatre to see Trans Scripts – the first play(as playwright) by Paul Lucas, who comes to the job with a wealth of experience as a producer.

What Trans Scripts has to offer is many things. First of all, it’s a very good piece of verbatim theatre – a great hour of engaging and enchanting performance. Six transgender women’s stories are told by six performers. We do not know if any of the women are telling their own story, or if they are all acting. We do not know which of the actors are transgender and which, if any, were assigned the female gender at birth. This is theatre, and the point is the stories, which shine through with strength and pride. Trans Scripts does not present some sort of universal, composite picture of transgender issues. By focusing on six distinct personal stories, it shows that there are as many ways to be a transgender woman as there are transgender women.

So, meet the girls: Sandra, Luna, Tatiana, Zakia, Josephine, and Eden. They represent not the full spectrum – that would be impossible – but a spectrum of transgender women’s views.

Sandra, played by the legendary Capernia Addams, is the play’s mother figure; the glue that holds it all together. She’s from Staten Island, and her story starts  in childhood with a desire to steal the damask cloth beneath the family parakeet’s cage to make herself a skirt. Her journey to become the strong and noble older woman she now is takes her far and wide, and yet always circles around Staten Island. It’s a massive challenge to see off the hurt of being ignored by people she’s known all her life who refuse to acknowledge her as a woman, but she sees it through. Once, she was sent to counselling. Now she is a counsellor. Throughout the piece, Sandra is often to be found with her hand on another woman’s shoulder, offering support as their story emerges.

Luna is a tall, skinny woman with afro hair, big eyes, and lips painted a chalky beige, in sharp contrast with her dark skin. She’s punky and streetwise, dressed in a teeny leather jacket, see-thru net T-shirt, and bright red micro mini skirt. She was raised by a grandmother, but also spent time in foster care, and is a veteran of the Manhattan gay and trans scene. A seminal moment in her life comes when she meets her blind elderly grandfather and has to ask him if he knows she is transgender. You’re my granddaughter and I’m proud of you, he says. They share an interest in radical politics, and she gives the show a strong sense of the history of the transgender struggle, from Stonewall to STAR and beyond.  My punky, Gay Liberation Front supporting younger self is naturally drawn strongly to Luna’s stories and to Jay Knowles fabulous presence as she inhabits those stories.

For Tatiana, being a transgender woman is an identity she embraces – both the ‘woman’ and the ‘transgender’ parts of the equation. Her story brings us right into the experience of transitioning in the 1960s and 70s, taking friends’ birth control bills, finding doctors willing to prescribe hormones, developing breasts (which she’s so proud of she feels the need to invite a gentleman in the audience to affirm their beauty, cupping his hands around them), and confronting the question of gender-reassignment surgery. Bianca Leigh plays her with perfectly-pitched dignity and confidence.

The larger-than-life Zakia takes everything in her stride and has always believed in herself. She’s a sassy, sexy and self-assured former beauty pageant queen. There’s not an ounce of self-doubt about her, and she meets any opposition (from her mother, from the ladies at the local church) square on. Carolyn M Smith, playing Zakia, has the audience eating out of her hand as she sashays and sways around the space with a big grin on her face. ‘I can see you’re looking at me!’ she says playfully to a man in the front row.

Josephine is about as far away from Zakia as you can imagine. She is a plainly dressed middle-aged woman in slacks and a colourful jumper who is desperate to be a regular, ordinary woman – the girl next door, unassuming, unnoticed. She’s married to a woman who she loves dearly, and one of her biggest fears was how her wife would react to her coming out as transgender. Or discovering her true gender. The politics of language are difficult to work through. She’s played sympathetically and delicately by Australian actress Catherine Fitzgerald, and her story breaks my heart.

Eden, played by British actress Rebecca Root, brings a very different story to the table: one of being born inter-gender, with both male and female sexual characteristics. Her parents take the decision to assign her as male. She has surgery as a child. She grows up, has a girlfriend she loves – but has a growing sense of dissatisfaction, and eventually chooses to transition. Or to reinstate the gender she feels she should have been assigned at birth. In Eden’s case, the language is even more difficult to pick your way through. Her story of  botched gender reassignment surgery, and the sorrow of always being somewhere in-between, is captured brilliantly by Root, who brings Eden’s intense anger and distress on to the stage with great skill.

These tales aren’t told as linear narratives, they weave around each other superbly – the writing and editing a model example of how to use verbatim text in a theatrically cohesive way. Taking a few stories and telling them properly is a good decision, combatting the kind of composite, superficial  view that can often blight verbatim theatre.

The staging is simple but effective. Upstage is an extended folding screen, the kind you might find in a lady’s dressing room, collaged and stencilled with images from women’s magazines. This visual motif is carried through to other stage furniture, plinths and tables draped with chintz cloths. There is a well-directed, simple choreography of sitting, standing, moving to a new station within the set as the stories emerge.

 Trans Scripts is of course primarily a vehicle for the voices of transgender women – but it also offers a more general reflection on what we mean by ‘gender’ and how we relate to our assigned or acquired gender. The debate will go on, and in new forms. Trans Scripts 2: The Men is already on the cards for 2016…

This is a good play, and it is also an important play. No matter what your designated biological sex, assigned or chosen gender, and sexual orientation might be, this is a show to see to make you think about who you are, why you are – and what you might want to be. Go get your magic!

In which performance artist Bryony Kimmings is joined by her advertising accounts manager boyfriend Tim Grayburn in the creation of a show exploring his clinical depression, her response to this, and their decision to face it together as they move forward as a couple, now expecting their first child.

On one level, there’s not much drama to the piece. Everything is presented upfront. We know the outcome from the beginning. They’re together. Tim has left his job and joined Bryony as a theatre-maker and touring performer. She’s pregnant. He’s handling his depression. Yet it’s filled with drama, as we backtrack to the start of the couple’s relationship, their falling in love, Bryony’s discovery of Tim’s terrible dark secret, her desire to rescue him, his attempt to kick the SSRIs (anti-depression drugs), his recovery, his regression, his further recovery, and where they are at now. It has us on the edge of their seats, our hearts in our mouths. For many audience members, there is no attempt to hold back the tears as we hear Tim’s pre-recorded voice (a series of audio interviews the couple have made, used throughout the piece) describing the onset of his depression, the symptoms – fatigue, anxiety, poor concentration, agitation etc – and the confusion and suicidal thoughts that followed. He is – and this is truly depressing in the 21st century – a young man who feels that he can’t share his worries with his friends or family, can’t visit a doctor. Real men don’t cry, so he hides the tears that pour from him daily.

This is issue-based theatre with a strong message: the outcome is the statement that a real man is not afraid to cry. A real man asks for help. The couple’s son will be told about his father’s depression – nothing will be hidden.

But it is a Bryony Kimmings show, so this is all played out in typical Kimmings fashion – what Andy Field calls ‘Bryony-ness’ in the notes he has written for the playscript. For yes, Bryony is at the Traverse, and there is a playscript. Performance art has come a long way – once upon a time you had to search very hard to find performance texts by the likes of Karen Finlay and Lenora Champagne, Bryony’s natural predecessors, which were rarely viewed as ‘proper plays’, because of the focus on autobiographical material, and the inclusion of such elements as pre-recorded taped voice and stylised physical actions using ‘real’ objects. Which is another way of saying that innovative though Fake It ‘Till You Make It is, it follows in a noble tradition.

So, what we get: there’s dances in underpants, silly socks and heads in baskets; slow-mo walks towards each other; jiggled signs listing symptoms, a tent erected on stage to the tune of The Carpenter’s Close To You, a whisk (her) and a hammer (him), and Japanese good-luck dolls hung around the space. There are ditties and confessions and kisses, and a bit of guitar playing. There are whole head masks that obscure Tim’s face and represent his mood swings – a head full of clouds, a horned beast, a coil of rope, a paper bag (its blankness the most disturbing of them all). When, finally, Tim appears unmasked, speaking directly into the mic rather than mediated through the recordings or through Bryony’s interpretations, it is a magical moment of pure, raw theatre.

In the interests of honesty, I feel I need to say that this isn’t my favourite piece by Bryony Kimmings – for me, that honour goes to previous work Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, which merged the personal and the political adroitly, yet maintaining a sense of artistic distance from the material that is missing here. Fake It ’Til You Make It is so rawly personal, so intimate, so tied up with the couple’s love for each other, and the onstage presence of their unborn child, that it feels impossible to engage in any sort of critical questioning of the content or delivery. Which is, perhaps, problematic.

It feels like the only reasonable response to the honesty and ‘realness’ of the show is the one that it has garnered from all quarters, so I will join others in saying that this is an important piece of work about clinical depression and masculinity, using theatre as a vehicle for the disseminating of information about the condition, by way of two people’s personal experience of this terrible curse of the modern world. And that is a valuable thing.

Welcome to Massiveville, which is in fact a small town populated by puppets. It has a local shop selling overpriced vegetables, a pub, a cottage hospital, and a recreational ground where young people take drugs and make out. Its puppet population includes old codger Howard, whiny middle-class teenager Suki who is like so sick of her parents, local cop Clive who’s seen it all, hippy-dippy Dinah who believes in fairies and omens, and nosey-parker Tina who likes a jammy dodger with her tea. Oh and Daz – Darrell – who’s an experimental theatre-maker, when he’s not being a stoner ‘ripped to the tits’. There’s been a local disaster – the beanstalk has fallen – and Daz is going to make a play about it, using the local villagers.

And so we have the set-up – a play about puppets putting on a play about Jack and the Beanstalk, a story that we would view as a fairy-tale: ‘a kind of verbatim true-crime, puppet docudrama’ as Blind Summit would have it.

The puppets are beautifully made Bunraku-style rod puppets with moveable jaws, perched on portable, wheeled stools and benches. They are marvellous creations – each puppet a larger-than-life character with an array of physical tics (literally, in one case) that give them a totally credible air of real existence. The choreography is brilliant – by Carolyn Choa, widow of film director Anthony Minghella, and co-creator with him of the lauded ENO opera Madama Butterfly, for which Blind Summit created the puppetry. The stools and benches bear their puppets aloft, flying across the stage into their places for their solo speeches, flocking and deflocking into ensemble groups. The five puppeteers in head-to-toe blacks are mostly Blind Summit veterans – artistic director Mark Down isn’t amongst them, but Laura Caldow (the feet of Moses in Blind Summit’s other current touring show, The Table), Simon Scardfield (Winston in the company’s version of 1984), Fiona Clift, and Jake Waring are here. And they are joined by Samuel Dutton, another highly experienced puppeteer. So there is skill aplenty in the production, which is a visual delight.

Mark Down’s writing is witty and edgy, but as is sometimes the case with Blind Summit, they have trouble sustaining a full-length show. There just isn’t enough to the story. Once we’ve got that this is a a modern fable about greed, acquisition and financial gain, based on a retelling of the classic British fairytale; and once we have met and heard from all the delightful characters, then that’s it. Where’s the drama, is the question. There’s a beginning, a fizzling out middle, and nothing in the way of an ending. It feels more like a comic sketch than a play, and would have made a fantastic 15 or 20 minutes, but there just isn’t enough in the way of an exploration of ideas or unfolding story to sustain it for an hour. By the half-way mark I feel I’ve got it, and long for something to shake things up.

Victoria Melody has been many things: pigeon fancier, Northern Soul dancer, championship dog handler (with her trusty friend Major Tom, subject of her last show). That show weaved together stories of the dog’s bid to win competitions with her own attempts at the beauty queen business – come on down Mrs Brighton! Part of her transformation into a beauty queen saw our Vic augmenting her barnet with hair extensions, transforming her into a luscious-locked blonde. The hair is real human hair, and it is glued on. Yes, human hair glued on to other human hair. At some point it occurred to her to ask: where did my hair come from?

So here we are: another show is born. This one has a set comprising a hairdresser’s chair – and the world’s only battery-operated hairdryer – a screen at the back of the stage, and to each side plinths with mirrors in front and a monitor on top of each. There are, of course, wigs involved. Lost of wigs. Short and dark. Long and blonde. Natural looking, and highly artificial. Marie Antoinette type artificial.

On her hairdresser’s trolley, Victoria has three ‘tails’ of hair which she’d used in her previous show. ‘Do you know whose hair this is?’ she asks. This becomes a repeated mantra throughout the show. Cue song: The Who – Who Are You?

In her search to find out, she goes to Kings College London where she meets a scientist who will help her with her quest. It turns out that one tail is from India. One is from Russia. And one is of unknown origin. It might even be pony – a real pony tail!

So off she goes to India where she meets Nerika, who has been trying to get herself to Tiramala temple to get ‘tonsured’ – to have her head shaved as an act of religious observance, sacrifice, and purification. The extremely personable Nerika becomes a key player in the show, appearing on screen, on the monitor stage-right, throughout, as we follow her decision-making process. On the screen stage-left is another key-player, Beverly, who is Victoria’s cousin.We similarly get to hear about her life and decisions around her hair: Beverly is a single mother who believes in not letting yourself go when you have kids, making regular trips to beauty parlours, and to the hairdressers for extensions. Pairing these two is perfect. And as is the case in all of Victoria Melody’s highly anthropological theatre pieces, her subjects are observed with loving neutrality. No judgement is passed on anyone’s choices.

She also travels to Russia and meets a hair dealer – Russian ‘virgin’ hair is the most desired in the world. No, it doesn’t mean the hair of virgins – it’s that the long fair hair doesn’t need bleaching, making it highly desirable. On the screen at the back of the stage, we watch as dealer Russlan negotiates with women carrying their dead mother’s hair in carrier bags, or with women who have grown and cut and sold their hair four or five or more times.

Hair Peace feels like the sequel it is to Major Tom – and if, at the moment, it doesn’t feel quite as strong a work, that is probably down to the newness of the material rather than the content, which is equally engaging. Or maybe it’s just that there’s no dog live on stage – what can follow that? The structure of the show follows a similar pattern – her anthropological research transposed into a mix of cheery, confessional performance and film – and the core subject matter is similarly to do with female image and the beauty business.

It is not Victoria Melody’s style to be ardently polemical. Yet her work manages to unite the personal and the political in a seamless way, never losing track of the need to entertain when on a stage. The whole business of the significance of a woman’s crowning glory is investigated with wit and humour. Why are we so obsessed with hair?

And there are questions aplenty here about the hair extensions and wigs business. Do Indian temple-goers know that their hair is going to be sold to the West at vast profit? Do we care if women in Russia get £15 for hair that will cost ten times that amount in a swish hairdressing salon? Is it right that human hair is brought into the UK not as a body part but as an accessory?

An hour in Victoria Melody’s company is always thought-provoking and entertaining in equal measure. She has a way about her that invites the confiding of confidences from collaborators, and the conveying of information gleaned with both charm and confidence. There’s no fourth wall, and her relationship with the audience is engaged and respectful, with moments of audience interaction handled with aplomb. A delightful show!