Theatre review: Falling-flying, Glasgow

news.scotsman.com – By Joyce McMillan

Expectations are high around this small but vivid show in the Tron’s Changing House studio. The writer, Stef Smith, was the woman behind the text for last year’s mighty Edinburgh Fringe hit, Roadkill, and the director, Ros Philips, has just completed a hugely successful run as a trainee at the Citizens’. This latest work, a 50-minute theatrical poem called Falling/Flying, goes boldly to the heart of transgender experience, using two voices – one male but also female, the other female but also male – to explore something like the life-story of a young transsexual who lives life briefly but to the full – with pain, with fear, but also with moments of contentment and ecstasy – and then dies young, from a cancer apparently related to the many drugs he has taken, in the quest for a female form.