Adam

The National Theatre of Scotland has developed a diverse portfolio of online work since last summer, from its extensive collection of remotely filmed shorts Scenes for Survival, to the theatre-based, theatre-celebrating Ghost Light. Adam is different again: a reworking for screen of Frances Poet’s play dramatising the life of its lead actor Adam Kashmiry, a young trans man from Egypt seeking asylum in Scotland.

Co-produced with Hopscotch Films, directors Cora Bissett (director of the production that began life at the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe) and Louise Lockwood place the shivery desperation of Kashmiry’s performance front and centre.

Poet’s poetic script takes in Adam’s memories of a closeted and combative adolescence in Egypt. But it’s most interesting when conveying the interminable administrative hell entrapping him, unable to physically transition without asylum and struggling to gain it without proving his ’condition’. Here, Adam’s dynamic with Yasmin Al-Khudhairi – playing another side of himself he feels mixed about losing – is allowed to sing.