No I.D. – Royal Court Theatre

No I.D. continues at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, London until 6 May 2023.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Acting, and acting in musical theatre especially, is a highly performative act. For Tatenda Shamiso, growing up as a musical theatre kid in America, the performance never stopped offstage, either.

Back then, Tatenda was a girl named Thandiwe. Not all trans people refer to their life pre-transition in such terms, but Shamiso’s autobiographical show No I.D. is all about everything he learned as Thandiwe, what he was able to bring forward into his life as Tatenda, and what he was frightened to risk losing.

Ever present in Shamiso’s piece is the bureaucracy needed to change one’s name and gender marker. As a dual Belgian-American citizen, born in California to Dutch and Zimbabwean parents and now living in London, there is a lot of paperwork to get through. There are so many organisations and people he needs to contact that he puts them off – and yet, the more gradual the process of updating his records, the more he frets that it looks like he’s committing fraud.

But while paperwork is an ever present antagonist, Shamiso focuses on his physical and emotional journey. Prerecorded segments from Thandiwe’s friends and mother talk of a young, sweet, precocious girl – someone who shined on the musical stage, partly because that was a place where she couldn’t be bullied. In a home video where Thandiwe takes the lead in Anything Goes, Tatenda attempts – and fails – to match her frenetic tap-dancing routine. Thandiwe was, he says, someone who is hard to keep up with.

Shamiso talks openly and honestly about the process by which he came to recognise his trans identity. The concept of an explicitly binary male/female gender system is explained as a curiously European concept that doesn’t exist in many other cultures. Shamiso finds himself unable to verbalise exactly why gender fluidity alone didn’t relieve his sense of dysphoria, which in many ways is more revealing than anything perfectly articulated could ever manage.

One way in which the progression from Thanidwe to Tatenda is marked is in the use of songs. A prolific songwriter, Thandiwe’s early songs talk about her girlhood; onstage, Tatenda quietly plays and sings along to Thandiwe’s recorded voice.

As the show progresses, his accompaniments become bolder, more complementary. Finally, Thandiwe’s last relationship break-up is recorded in the first song written and performed by Tatenda alone. “I know Thandiwe couldn’t have written that,” he tells us.

But Thandiwe is still with him, he says. Not all trans people have such a good relationship with their old self, and may not want to publicly acknowledge those moments where they see their old selves inside them. Shamiso describes her as gone, but sometimes “taking a walk along my bones”; a soul that tiptoes where once she tap-danced.

No I.D. is a record of one person’s attempt to navigate an external system that is designed to confuse and obstruct, where even the sections of the healthcare system that are ostensibly there to help are also designed to reinforce a constructed sense of binary genders. But more than that, it shows that the internal system of change is just as messy. For Shamiso, the progression from Thandiwe (whose name means “she who is loved”) to Tatenda (“thank you”) does not mean abandoning the former; but now, Tatenda is at last able to keep up.

Scott Matthewman