Ugly Sisters review – deft duo riff on Germaine Greer’s encounter with a trans woman

‘Thank you so much for all you have done for us girls.” A line uttered to Germaine Greer by a trans woman on the day The Female Eunuch was issued in the US is the echoing refrain of this show from Untapped award winners Charli Cowgill and Laurie Ward.

Greer quoted the line in her 1989 article On Why Sex Change Is a Lie, a luridly dehumanising piece that reduces the trans woman to “it” in “flapping draperies”. As we begin, Ward takes the role of the trans woman in question, while Cowgill plays Greer. We compare their adornments: red lips, blond extensions and silk gown versus pearls, tight curls and the modern uniform of Greer’s intellectual descendants, the “adult human female” T-shirt.

Further passages from the article are scattered throughout. The cruel words contrast with scenes that span humour and tenderness. Episodes imagining Greer’s accidental death, burial and resurrection for a literary Q&A are played for laughs. There is a charged love scene where the pair tussle, become one, and reverse roles. Then a gentle hug with an audience member who plaits Cowgill’s hair as Greer’s words invade the stage again.

The play gives voice to our unnamed trans woman: “I make you stupid … stupefied. You don’t know what to do with me.” She offers a more expansive definition of womanhood, with agency and joy at its heart.

Through movement that plays with drag and contemporary dance, bodies get down in the dirt, proving slippery and changeable. With deceptively simple scenes, lucid dreams that seep into and build on one another, the pair dissect what it means to be seen by someone who inspired you or by someone you love; the longing to be seen beyond a first glance and yet the power of a first glance to bestow perfect understanding.

They extend a generosity to Greer that is conspicuously absent from her article. There is an imagined commonality and there are musings on how we step beyond her legacy. It’s an ephemeral and thought-provoking piece.

• At Underbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh , until 25 August
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