Review by Simon Jenner, July 1st 2025
“It started with my right hand.” Claire Dowie enters in blonde wig, tights and pouts kisses at the audience. Soon she’s sitting amongst them. But she sheds her extended nails. Twice. And clothes many times. She’s not Claire. She’s Helen. After holding the pose, Claire Dowie introduces her third play of four: the 2004 recently-revised H to He (I’m Turning into a man). Claire Dowie’s Swansong, a quartet of solo plays staged in rotation, comes to Finborough directed and designed by Dowie’s collaborator of over 40 years, Colin Watkeys, till July 5th.
Claire Dowie. Photo Credit: Colin Watkeys
Kafka’s Metamorphosis: the Comedy is one way of seeing how Dowie talks up the ageing phenomenon she regards with comically appalled fascination: as she takes us on Helen’s journey of skin roughening, testosterone habits, spraying the toilet, putting it up and down, identity crisis literally hinging on it. “”The toilet is like a stranger offering no clues.” Dowie’s narrative of gruff voice, suddenly finding her women friends sexually attractive (in a particularly male gaze way) and grungy habits spills out: eating dry cereal in front of TV.
But then there’s her insistent friend Tina feeding Claire grapes through the letterbox when she won’t open the door. It gets worse. And even when Sharon the cleaner also enters. Sharon though is unfazed. She’s seen this with her nephew the opposite way round: and more expensively.
Performative gender two years before Judith Butler’s Gender Troubles, in 2004 Dowie addresses a facet of this before anyone else. Dowie’s traversal is a comedic absurdism of a reality that ageing confers: a slight gender blur that attends it, acting on both sexes. Dowie’s armed with racks of clothes but also a couple of dummies topped with wigs (wig-swapping is a feature) and ultimately a leather bomber jacket: Dowie’s more rapid-changing than anywhere else. She matches this with several moments clambering into the audience, perched in the send row. She asks us to gender vegetables. Broccoli provokes a gender crisis but it’s resolved.
This is the most sheerly theatrical, light-hearted of the four shows Dowie’s brought to the Finborough. Though it’s also the most universally probing. It culminates not only in what Tina and Sharon decide on, but the visit of three tea-drinking Furies, Regret, Old Age and Despair. They’re waiting on Helen as the Messiah; or not. And all to Donna Summers (multiple songs) Marilyn Monroe, Tina Turner, Shirley Bassey and Tchaikowsky (Dowie’s Swan Lake, brief though it is, is singular).
Dowie’s language is sometimes a bit like Anglo-Saxon on speed. One full of anaphora (think the Beatitudes), of layered poetic use of the everyday. That’s particularly true of early work and Dowie’s 2019 When I Fall… If I Fall. Otherwise (as here) it alternates more frequently with slabs of prose where internal repetitions are delivered with pace, aplomb, building layers of emphasis; and ad-libs. Dowie’s particularly adept at self-correction, trip-up lines, the confiding and sudden speeding-up to indicate panic or frustration.
Each play lasting 65-70 minutes, it’s possible to see all four without overload. I said about Adult Child/Dead Child that “entering the litanic world of Claire Dowie is like hearing a Victoria Wood joke drawn over a hot piano wire. Without the piano.” Like that play, H to He isn’t quasi-autobiographical, but fields a persona.
The most exuberant introduction to Dowie’s 2025 Swansong, this outing of H to He is uproarious. Interactive and theatrical as we’ve seen, it’s full of jokes that detonate later. Dowie’s an original theatrical master whose imminent retirement means this is our last chance. A must-see for anyone who loves breakthrough: genre-defying, then genre-defining theatre.
Stage Manager Ted Walliker, Production Photography Colin Watkeys
General Manager Tara Marricdale, Assistant General Managers, Esther Knowles, Jenny Crakes, Silvia Verzaro. Assistant Resident Director Jillian Feuerstein, Cover Art Designer, Jillian Feuerstein
Producer Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre
Claire Dowie. Photo Credit: Colin Watkeys
