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Assured family comedy-drama spotlighting modern gender politics.Summary
Rating
Good
Change can be confusing, can’t it? When handsome young marine Isaac (Steffan Cennydd) returns home after three years tidying body parts off battlefields in a warzone, barely anything is as he remembers it. What’s been happening, and what does it mean for Isaac and his family?
Mum Paige (Felicity Huffman) has called a halt on housekeeping, so there are piles of clothes and other detritus scattered about. Dad Arnie (Simon Startin) has suffered “a little stroke” and is now barely verbal. Paige has dressed the former patriarch as a pink clown, keeps him docile with drugs, and dampens any flare of excitement with a quick spritz from a water spray. Oh, and Isaac’s sister Max (Thalía Dudek) is now his non-binary trans sibling, going by pronouns Zhi/Hir and revelling in a new scrap of skimpy facial hair.
Isaac reacts to all this with not only shock but several bouts of vomiting. “Adjust!” instructs Paige, who appears to have embraced these seismic shifts with an equanimity bordering on enthusiasm, and hence we are invited to examine the advance of modern gender politics through the eyes of one willing convert and one astonished young man who perhaps has some catching up to do. But Isaac is not quite the straight stereotype he at first seems, having been disgracefully discharged from the marines for a drug habit that saw him taking crystal meth up his arse. With a straw, since you ask.
Despite refuting suggestions that he’s suffering from PTSD, when Paige and Max leave for the weekly “Cultural Saturday” excursion, Isaac is confronted with his ghostly demons, and the first half of the play closes with a dramatic swell of music (Roly Botha) and a spellbinding transformation of Ceci Calf’s set. It’s a fantastic theatrical moment, sound and action combining to take us somewhere thrilling and unexpected.
We rejoin the show to find that Isaac – with military vigour and discipline – has returned the house to the order he was used to, and with which he feels comfortable. This is greeted with screams of horror as Paige and Max come back from their outing. Maybe the new order is to be short-lived…
The rest of the play sees a battle of wills between Isaac as the son attempting to re-establish the patriarchal system his mother has discarded, and Paige the more forward-thinking of the two. There’s some effective to-and-fro as Isaac plays on Max’s “trans masc” identity to bond with his sibling, but Paige’s creative rituals of musicianship and shadow puppetry pull against Isaac’s militaristic traditionalism.
Hir is a play stuffed with ideas and thought-provoking situations. It yields a lot of laughs and some strong dramatic beats. What it rather lacks is a sense of what the writer Taylor Mac is trying to say about the issues he’s exploring. I wasn’t looking for a simplistic answer to the conundrums he’s playing with, but if you satirise every side of an argument you leave your audience at some distance from a satisfying conclusion.
The cast are uniformly excellent, including Hollywood’s Ms Huffman. There are many things to enjoy and think about in this show – I just wish Mac could have crafted his play to lead us somewhere which dispelled at least a little of the confusion he presents us with.
Written by: Taylor Mac
Directed by: Steven Kunis
Produced by: David Adkin and RJG Productions in association with Midnight Theatricals and Park Theatre
Hir plays at Park Theatre until 16 March. Further information and bookings can be found here.
