Was ever a debut show longer awaited? Chloe Petts’ first solo hour was good to go just as Covid reared its spikes, since when – solo shows be damned! – she has established herself as one of our most compelling young comics. But it’s still a treat to discover what she can do with an hour to herself, in a show, Transience, that’s evolved from its nipped-in-the-bud 2020 predecessor.
What she can do is wade into the thorniest conversations of our time – to do with gender fluidity, male privilege and toxic masculinity – and emerge with a show that’s all sweet nature and smiles. That she does so without soft-soaping or compromising on her own beliefs is the sign of a skilful comic – as are the jokes, which keep proceedings buoyant throughout.
The gist is that Petts, 28, is living life as “the man I always wanted to be” – but not always accepted as such by everyone else. Her femininity questioned by a woman in the queue for the loos, her masculinity doubted by fellow fans at Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park, Petts arrives on stage with a perspective that’s precision-made for insight. The way women and (mainly) men behave, those gendered codes most of us barely notice, Petts spends her life puzzling at and often preferring not to accept.
Not that she considers herself superior: she happily turns the jokes on herself here, pretending to a masculine swagger that seldom survives contact with the real, bewildering world. Witness her (and the shopkeeper’s) awkwardness and confusion when Petts is misgendered in a corner shop. Or her impromptu reaction when shoved to the ground by an aggressive male pedestrian.
Such moments remind Petts, sometimes brutally, of her contested place on the gender spectrum. But in a show that casts her journey between the binaries as a voyage of unexpected and often joyful discovery, they are reported in a spirit of cheerful anthropological curiosity. Ending with a plea that we relax the rigidity of our gender thinking, Petts makes a fine contribution to that cause, and takes the heat out of a fraught conversation, with a first show that was worth waiting for.
At Soho theatre, London, until 7 May and at the Pleasance, Edinburgh, 3-28 August.
