Chloe Petts was planning to premiere her first full-length show in Edinburgh in the summer of 2020, but we know what happened there. This gave the Kent-born comedian, who was already making waves on the stand-up circuit, two extra years to work on Transience, so it is maybe no surprise that it is one of the most accomplished debuts I’ve ever seen at the Edinburgh Fringe.
It is a classic “this-is-me” introduction to a new performer, with Petts eloquently explaining who she is and how she got here. Integral to this she talks about gender, a hot topic at the Fringe, in an accessible, calm – and very funny – way.
Petts says that she has always felt like a geezer, albeit a more cerebral type of geezer. She loves football and is a season ticket holder at Crystal Palace. There are obviously plenty of women who love football, but she feels as if she loves it the way men love it, identifying strongly with lad culture.
Nowadays she mostly wears trousers and baggy tops. Onstage she chuckles at her “Pre-Gay Years” while a screen displays an old picture of her as an adolescent in a dress with a clutch bag. Teens can often look awkward. This image takes awkwardness to another level. Petts knows it and is engagingly self-deprecating about her past sartorial failings.
This is a work filled with anecdotes full of humour and honesty. She recalls being pushed over in the street by a sausage-fingered yob – not nice, though on the other hand they did it because they thought she was a man, which was a new experience. Elsewhere as she started being treated as a man more often she saw male privilege first hand.
All of this is delivered in a chatty, easy-going style. Petts, who has come to the Fringe match-fit having supported Ed Gamble on tour, has an assured authority and from the very start, when the last bars of Fat Les’ Vindaloo have died down and she cracks her first self-mocking joke, she is in total control, going from playful to more serious and back again at will.
As the show, directed by Rose Johnson, builds it conveys the message that gender is as fluid as a river. Petts is finally happy in her skin. And never more so than when watching Palace at Selhurst Park, where fellow season ticket holders engage her in boring bloke chat about motorways. She laughs, but is now is enjoying life as “the man I always wanted to be”.
