Trans People Are Awful at Pleasance Courtyard Review
Ros Watt’s jet-black comedy thriller is confrontational, grotesque and frequently very funny, but beneath the blood, axes and deliberately provocative title is a surprisingly tender examination of identity, shame and the desperate desire to be understood.
We meet Boy in a garage in North-East Scotland, covered in blood and preparing to record an explanation video for the true-crime obsessives who will eventually discover his story. His plan is as horrifying as it is absurd: murder cis men, steal their body parts and use them to construct the body he believes will finally make him whole. He knows the surgery will kill him. That, apparently, is part of the appeal.
It would be easy for a show like this to become provocation for provocation's sake. Thankfully, Watt is considerably more intelligent than that.
Instead, Trans People Are Awful uses Boy’s grotesque fantasy to interrogate the strange expectations placed upon marginalised characters. What happens when trans people are only allowed to be inspirational, sympathetic or politically palatable? What happens when the possibility of simply being awful, complicated or morally repugnant becomes something that feels forbidden?
Watt doesn't exactly make Boy easy to like. Nor should they. His logic is warped, his actions are horrifying and his increasingly elaborate justification of them is frequently disturbing. But the emotional machinery underneath it is recognisable: loneliness, dysphoria, isolation, shame and the exhausting desire to finally feel legitimate.
The theatrical form mirrors Boy’s increasingly fractured mind. Opera, dance, grotesque comedy, obsessive scrapbooks and true-crime aesthetics collide as he attempts to control the narrative of his own life. At times, the sheer accumulation of ideas slightly overwhelms the central story, and some of the more overtly provocative material can feel as though it is pushing against the audience simply to see how much pressure the room will take.
But then Watt performs.
It is an excellent, feral and astonishingly controlled performance. They fling themselves between comedy, menace, vulnerability and outright physical chaos with an almost frightening precision. There is something exhilarating about watching Watt completely surrender to Boy's grotesque worldview, while still maintaining an extraordinary clarity of storytelling. And when the performance finally strips away the theatrics, what remains is genuinely heartbreaking.
That tonal shift is the show's greatest achievement. The laughter begins to feel uncomfortable. The horror becomes sad. The ridiculous becomes painfully human.
Trans People Are Awful isn't interested in giving its audience the reassuring trans narrative they might expect. It wants to ask why we expect marginalised people to make themselves likeable before we allow them complexity.
It's messy, provocative and occasionally overstuffed, but it is also genuinely bold theatre — anchored by a performance I won't be forgetting anytime soon.
And yes, trans people can be awful.
So can everyone else.
Trans People Are Awful is playing at Pleasance Courtyard at 15.20 until 31st August .
★★★★★
Written by Liam Arnold for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.
