Ever wanted to be someone else? Ollie does. He would like to be Bruce Springsteen, a singer whose songs, he says, speak to blue-collar America. Ollie is slight, British, and runs his own design business. He, in turn, is played by Ira Brand, complete with a beard and goatee. So does Brand want to be Ollie? I don’t think so, but she constantly makes you evaluate who the “I” is in this exploration of performed gender and sexual encounters.
Is the “I” who has sex in a car park the same “I” as the woman playing Ollie? Is Ollie the man who the first “I” had sex with? And who is the “I” in a subsequent encounter: Ollie or Ira? Here, identities melt together. Advertising tells us we can be anything we want, but Brand questions that notion. In Break Yourself, she asks: does painting on a beard and sitting with your legs a little apart really make you a man any more than singing along to Dancing in the Dark makes you a rock god? Whatever the answer, it is not only gender and identity that is under scrutiny.
Erica Jong may have written about the “zipless fuck” in the 1970s, but as Brand suggests, desire is not only about sexual attraction – it is also bound up with power and status. This unflashy, thoughtful and sometimes raw show questions whether we can really break free of socially constructed ideas of gender.
• At Forest Fringe, Edinburgh, until 20 August.
