REVIEW: Someone Has Got to Be John, Speakbeast, EdFringe 2025 ★★★

Who, or what, is John? Member of The Beatles? Forgotten YouTuber? Medical professional, audience member, or something entirely less tangible? Speakbeast throw you for a loop with this question in their absorbing, feverish tale that starts (and ends?) in 1969. Utterly captivating and at times scathing, with production value through the roof, Someone Has Got to Be John presents a metaphor-packed critical exploration of transgender identities and healthcare.

There is no right way to be – and certainly no right way to be transgender. This is the sentiment that, hanging on well-chosen audio snippets of the First International Conference on Gender Identity in 1969, drips from every surreal, vibrant pore of the production. If the art of the tribute act is symbolic of outward performance of gender, then the strict stipulations required to be considered a Beatles tribute are the ways in which transgender identities are limited by a pervasive binary. Wear a dark suit, smoke if you’re Harrison, sit in the back and play drums if you’re Starr – and for the love of goodness, where is John? These are the stern (we are told) criteria required to be accepted as a proficient likeness of the Beatles. But what if you can no longer bear to wear the suit, or if John is still nowhere to be found? Will you still be considered a permissable tribute?

Speakbeast interrogates the complexities of this question in an hour of innovative lighting, fever-dream vignettes and too many elusive Johns to keep track of. After introducing both the Conference and the Beatles in 1969, both events remain intertwined as our tribute Ringo (Lowen Hunt), George (Anya Idrizi) and Paul (Isaac Frost) explore a potted history of transmedicalism. Audio clips from the real 1969 Conference make for remarkably painful hearing, as medical professionals discuss in arbitrary tones the experiences of trans individuals.

However, we are not left to our own devices to listen – cleverly imagined staging whisks our attention away. Memorably, for example, is the exceptional send-up of one such audio clip, with ‘George’ (Anya Idrizi, also Director) in a white coat – bejewelled red ‘D A D D Y’ on the back – mouthing along to spoken words about the alleged inherent submissive nature of ‘transsexuals’. It is dark parody, and does well to mock the absurdity of what we hear. Playful, yes – light-hearted, no. Although there are startling moments of wit that provoke audience laughs, the tone overall is menacing, like a sharply written political column played out as unnerving dream. It is only near the end, as the bravado and suits are peeled off, that we see a softer underbelly of the show. Paul applies Testosterone Gel quietly, calmly, a simple of routine. Frost – who writes as well as performing – is an endearing performer, and it’s his searing vulnerability near the end that prevents the show from losing grip completely and drifting up and out of the stratosphere in bewildering dreamlike sequences.

Speakbeast readily acknowledges their mission of “strange, soft and unusual” theatre, which is a wildly apt description for Frost’s writing – he has succeeded here in spades, but the approach also left an uneasy lack of continuity. Although Adrizi’s direction is thoroughly enchanting aesthetically and musically, and this makes for an inventive contribution to important discussions of transgender medical care and gender identity affirmation, the production loses its way slightly.

Sections of the audience are trained up near the beginning in participatory responses – we rehearse, but then when our cue question comes up, the opportunity to reply is usurped by a response on stage from the cast instead. Crushingly, one poor audience member was (understandably) caught out, shouting out the rehearsed response alone. I hoped initially that they were a hired plant and that it would be addressed (they weren’t and it wasn’t), and next that perhaps it was all part of the production: to catch someone out each night to show that it’s, err, horrible being caught out? (Cannot confirm, but seemed unlikely).

At times, the multiplicity of ‘John’ and its many meanings become too fragmented – is John a person after all? No. Maybe? Suddenly ‘carpet weevils’ are involved and the show becomes almost tiresomely layered, accruing more questions than answers. If even one or two more scenes were slightly less abstract, this might provide a more potent message or call to action at the end if desired.

Nonetheless, this last is not a problem per se for a production that is centred on the highly individualised experience of gender, and its history with health services in the UK. It is genuinely exciting to find a production that will be pieced together slightly differently by each member of the audience. With some tweaks to structure, this could be a important piece of theatre indeed.

Someone Has Got to Be John is a beguiling scrapbook collage on transmedicalism and how to get the world to see you how you want to be seen. And needless to say, the soundtrack is really great.

Recommended Drink: A Maccarita. No, really – Sir Paul McCartney’s citrusy twist on the Margarita. Look it up.

Catch Someone Has Got to Be John between 11th to 23rd August at 6.0pm at theSpace Triplex – Studio. Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.