Bi-Curious George: Snail Trail ★★★☆☆

Bi-Curious George: Snail Trail — ★★★

Cute, clever, endearing and completely unexpected, Snail Trail uses one unlikely little creature to explore some enormous questions about gender, identity and getting to know yourself.

Bi-Curious George takes the physicality of the snail and uses it as the entry point into a journey through trans masculinity, body dysphoria and transition. Rather than relying on obvious snail puns, the show finds clever connections between the snail’s body and the experience of inhabiting a body that doesn’t necessarily align with how the world perceives you.

It’s silly, but deeply reflective.

Songs are intertwined throughout, alongside moments of joy and delight, while the writing asks some beautifully simple questions. Why do you have to be one sex? Why must you be one or the other? What about being non-binary or neither?

Snail Trail manages to explain these ideas in a way that could be genuinely accessible to someone who has never understood them before, without losing the specificity of the trans masc experience at its centre. At a festival overflowing with voices, this feels like one that deserves to be heard.

There is also something wonderfully fitting about the show’s own description of people being full of “irrational nonsense”. In many ways, that phrase captures the production itself: wonderfully strange, playful, messy and bursting with ideas.

You can tell Snail Trail is still in workshop mode. Some elements need tightening and the journey isn’t quite as polished as its premise deserves. But the potential here is enormous.

With a little more time to come fully out of its shell, Snail Trail could become something very special indeed.

Don’t let this one crawl past you. Follow the trail, grab a ticket and get there before everyone else catches up.