Suspect Device
Belfast Castle
★★★☆☆
“‘Call me Wilma’ says bus man Bill,” the front page of the Sunday World proclaimed in 1977.
Wilma Creith, formerly William George Creith, a married electrician with two children, was one of the first trans women in Northern Ireland to undergo gender-reassignment surgery. Her brave decision was, however, in vain. Wilma died a mere three days after surgery, in Leeds in 1980, as the result of a blood clot caused by fatally high levels of oestrogen.
Her poignant story has prompted an intriguing new production, directed by Paula McFetridge for Kabosh, in collaboration with Outburst Arts and Paperxclips. The writer is Raphaël Amahl Khouri, a Berlin-based, transgender Jordanian documentary playwright and theatremaker.
This high-concept piece is presented inside a vintage Ulsterbus parked in the grounds of Belfast Castle. From behind the wheel of a similar vehicle, Wilma ferried hordes of children from the north Co Down seaside town of Bangor to their schools along the shores of Belfast Lough, at the height of the Troubles. Throughout her difficult transition period, inside a male-dominated working environment, she was permitted by her employers to live and dress as a woman, as required by medical rules.
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The tone and wording of the newspaper headline speak volumes about widely held attitudes at the time regarding queer and trans people. Compassion was a rare commodity; “otherness” was held up for derision, condemnation and scorn rather than for celebration.
The audience boards the bus like a party of recalcitrant schoolchildren. Once they are seated, Wilma climbs aboard, eyeballs her charges, starts the engine and sets off on an itinerary mapped out by Eoin Robinson’s cartoony video graphics. But today’s journey is different. In an extended and not always effective parallel with ancient Greek mythology, Wilma is in her afterlife, her passengers are troubled ghosts who choose their own destinations, and the route crosses not the Lagan but the Styx, the underworld river and a bridge between the quick and the dead.
Mariah Louca’s statuesque Wilma brings an uneasy fragility into her portrayal of a courageous individual who, just as she has succeeded in finding her true self, has her new future cruelly cut short. Within the tight confines of the bus aisle and driving seat, she must navigate a series of linear exchanges with Claire Lamont’s tense cancer victim Pamela and Beca Barton’s sparky but vulnerable Janice, who holds back on mourning the death of her partner, Julie, for fear of incurring the sanctimonious wrath of Vincent Higgins’s thunderous Reverend.
In a script punctuated by arch humour and overloaded exposition, the dramatic climax is reached when Wilma, in a magnificent act of defiance, casts out the hymn-singing, Bible-bashing cleric as though he were the very devil himself.
Suspect Device is at Belfast Castle, as part of Outburst Queer Arts Festival, until Sunday, December 1st
