This intimate one act, one women (one hermaphrodite?) show is an exercise in transformation, rejection and the articulate search for acceptance. Familiar to most of us but a painful daily reality and struggle for anyone born Intersex as was the protagonist of this play. Intersex people are treated as freaks, prophets or lewd entertainers but rarely are their own voices heard. This true story of Herculine Adélaîde Barbin is dramatized here by Sarah Leaver (who also wrote this interpretation of Herculines memoirs). Herculine wrote the memories as part of an early ‘therapy’ session. Interestingly the actual real memoires were rediscovered in the French archives by the great philosopher & sexual theorist Michel Foucault, who then published them (buy it here: )

The play, at the Oval House Theatre, London, follows the development and education of Adelaide during her convent school years, before exploring her tender, romantic first blushing of love, the judgment of the church and then the expulsions, brutal examinations, sex role change, humiliation and forced relocation to another city, gender and life. She becomes He and Sarah Leaver’s wide eyed, painfully vulnerable and searching acting is (in the very cosy Oval House Theatre) breathtakingly real and occasionally uncomfortably direct. She moves the story on with a collection of wonderful simple lighting changes, rapid costume changes and the inevitable explored gender change.

There is a genuinely thrilling moment of horror in the first part of the play as Adelaide confesses her love for another girl and transforms into and is then rebuked by a rabidly, rancid, rancorous and revolting rotten alliterative nun. A whore appears from a scarlet finger nail and a fight where the assailant is only visible from the blows he reigns down is frighteningly real. The constant interplay of characters and roles, all played by Leaver, could have become confusing but by keeping the narrative clear and progressing it only from Adelaide’s experience and point of view Leaver keeps us on board. I loved the no-good nasty nightmare nun, she stayed with me all the way home.

The simple staging, atmospheric lighting and ‘Parisian’ music by Jason Pegg added to the feeling of being in a garret and there was doom in the air, the mounting hiss of gas reminding us of the flickering lighting & spirit of Herculines’ tragic end.

Although ultimately there is no redemption in Herculines story, there is an honesty and vulnerability in this performance that perhaps goes some way to testifying to the uniqueness of this individuals fascinating life and today, 150 year’s later it challenges us, as it no doubt challenged Sarah & the director Denise Evans, to look at the roles we perform for the amusement of others, the roles we perform for ourselves and the roles we perform without realising.

Sarah Leaver's ingenious Herculine is is a passionate mix of Orlando, Chatterton and Hedder Gabbler, in control of nothing but his/her choices, buffeted by suffocating opinions and judged by the strict conformity of rigid society, but a true intersex voice none the less.

Eric Page, |G-Scene — 12th March 2010