And the Rest of Me Floats
Bush Theatre, London

SPECTACULAR and challenging, And the Rest of Me Floats is an interrogation of how we control and regulate our bodies, forcing them into inadequate and restrictive gendered boxes, male and female.

But, more importantly, it’s about celebrating those trans and gender non-conforming individuals who refuse that regulation and that simplistic binary choice.

Devised by the Outbox Theatre company, the play offers snatches of the cast’s personal narratives – stories of coming out and moving through the world as someone who doesn’t fit – but these never coalesce into a traditional narrative thread and are all the more powerful for refusing to.

Rather than being asked to be sympathetic to a single person or story, we’re instead presented with a spectrum of voices and experiences which overlap throughout and at times this creates an unpleasant chorus of aggressive questioning, a wave of speakers who believe they have the right to police other people’s bodies.

“How many surgeries have you had?” they question. “What’s your diagnosis?” and “Why d’you always have to be the different one?” But at times this creates a powerful sense of community, of shared experience, support and complexity.

The production doesn’t just celebrate people on the margins, it also shows all the ways in which the non-conforming exist in the centre of contemporary culture and the moments where the cast ventriloquise pop songs are powerful moments of asserting that place. Michelle Tiwo’s performance of Skunk Anansie does this with incredible power.

Not all the sections work equally well. Some, like the scene in which bodies are highlighted by torchlight, begin in a powerful fashion and then drag.  But there’s a panache to the performances by all involved and they’ve come up with a forceful indictment of the rights we think we have to other people’s bodies.

But it’s an even more powerful celebration of the beauty of refusing conventions.

Runs until March 16, box office bushtheatre.co.uk