8 – 10 June
Beth is not on stage at first, but she is everywhere. In You’ve Gone Quiet, written and produced by Cerys Duffy and directed by Andy McLeod, the trans journalist at its centre is introduced through other people’s need of her: as friend, lover, symbol, headline, hope, threat, and source material.
That is the play’s smartest move. Told largely in the second person, it places the audience inside the experience of being endlessly negotiated over. Everyone around Beth believes they are asking for something reasonable, but each person arrives with their own claim on her body, her story or her future. By the time Beth appears, she already belongs a little bit to everyone else.
The opening predicament is excellent. Tara, played with force by Gennifer Becouarn, asks Beth to help her conceive a child. It is intimate, funny and morally sticky, the kind of request that might belong to friendship alone if the world did not insist on making Beth’s body and choices public property.
From there, Duffy’s writing opens out into a wider question of narrative ownership. If Beth writes about the situation, does she betray a friend or offer another trans person hope? Who benefits when private pain becomes public argument? The first half is sharp and tightly pressured, moving quickly between affection, need, manipulation and hurt.
The ensemble work is strong. Oliver Redpath brings warmth and comic ease as Gaz, while Matt Vickery gives Rory a convincing mix of shame, need and evasion. Sophia Vi’s Samantha usefully complicates the moral field, refusing the comfort of simple solidarity. Shane Convery’s eventual appearance as Beth carries weight because the structure has made her absence so active.
The production captures the texture of contemporary pressure well: notifications, headlines, online pile-ons, private wounds converted into discourse. Its strongest insight is that transphobia does not only operate through open hostility, but through minimisation, fetishisation, liberal discomfort and the exhausting demand that one person become useful to everyone else’s argument.
Hard-edged queer pop interstitials give the piece bite and momentum, and the sparse staging keeps the focus on language, proximity and pressure. At its best, it feels like watching a person slowly hemmed in by other people’s versions of themselves.
The second half grows darker and more expansive, and not every turn is as sharp as the set-up. Some confrontations explain what the play has already dramatised, and the ending reaches for repair a little more neatly than the bruising material quite allows. But the emotional argument remains clear, and the play’s hope feels deliberate rather than evasive.
You’ve Gone Quiet is funny, immediate and well worth seeing. It asks a vital question: when a trans woman’s life is turned into a story, who gets protected by the telling, and who pays the cost?
★★★★☆. Tilly Marshall, 9 June 2026
Photography credit: Paul Macauley
