Not the least achievement of Chloe Petts’ debut show Transience was that it waded into the most heated debate of the day, gender fluidity, and emerged all sweetness and smiles. Quite the turnaround, then, that its follow-up rebrands Petts as angry and aggressive. It’s a case of “no more Mr Nice Chloe”, she snarls, in a show that addresses Petts’ issues (according to her therapist) with suppressed rage.
That’s the conceit, at any rate, and you can see what attracted her to it. She describes herself as a split personality – one half “beautiful gentle queer”, one half “the referee’s a wanker”, Crystal Palace-supporting geezer. We have had the former’s show, so now why not the latter’s? There’s comic mileage, too, in watching this indelibly good-natured comic play hostile. She may start off faux-bullying the men in the front row, but by the end it’s all flirtation and batted eyelids.
