The Prince review

A winking combination of two subjects rarely absent from current headlines – the monarchy and transgender people – the debut play by Abigail Thorn (best known for her YouTube channel Philosophy Tube) lands two trans girls in a metatheatrical Shakespearean nightmare. Henry IV, Part I, to be precise.

Or should that be three trans girls? In Natasha Rickman’s production, Thorn’s Hotspur flinches – subtly at first – from her warlike, princely mantle. Compelled to act the story through to its grisly end, Sam (Joni Ayton-Kent) and Jen (Mary Malone) are torn over whether they can awaken Hotspur to her real, trans identity and still escape back to their own lives outside the play. 

Thorn brings a brittle, uneasy energy to Hotspur (and dips a toe into some of Hamlet’s speeches) and though she can command, her need for liberation is achingly clear. Malone’s bemused, lackadaisical facial expressions are a delight, as she counts out her iambic pentameter to fit in. Ayton-Kent’s world-weary Sam is a sadder, softer presence; she’s intriguingly burdened with somehow knowing all the rules of navigating them out of the mess, yet the script seems oddly uninterested in her. All the cast switch with relish in and out of Shakespearean verse and regional accents, with Corey Montague-Sholay’s gay, sarcastic Prince Hal being particularly fun. 

Martha Godfrey’s lighting, mostly from suspended, occasionally colourful, fluorescent bars, doesn’t vary enough to match the shifting roles and glitching Shakespearean narrative. Lulu Tam’s set, redolent of a chessboard with shiny black and white squares, is suitably abstract for Jen and Sam’s multiverse-traversing, but feels cold. There’s little for the actors to brace themselves against and Rickman’s direction keeps them at a distance from each other. In a text-heavy play, there’s a lot of running off and on, but it’s often slow rather than agile. 

Tianna Arnold’s clear-voiced Kate, Hotspur’s wife, gets a rather rushed interrogation of her lot, but their marriage is under-explored. Likewise, while there’s plenty of comedy in Jen’s struggle to acclimatise to the Hundred Years War tumult, her relationship with Sam is thinly sketched, and the dynamics of their row about their involvement are tricky to follow. The time spent in Shakespeare mode feels long in the second act, and the rules that govern how and when they break out of it remain fuzzy. 

The analogy strains under all the pressure imposed on it, its creaking plot mechanics an unwelcome distraction. Still, this is an admirably ambitious play, with tantalising ideas about the performance of gender and duty. And it’s a pleasure to watch a piece that is not only explicit about trans readings of Shakespearean characters but that actually has more than one trans person on stage at once. Here’s to more of that.