Boobytrapped ★★★★☆

Boobytrapped — ★★★★

Skin Deep, but Anything But Shallow

The scene for Boobytrapped is established before the show even begins. As the audience enters, its two performers are already on stage, waiting for the magic and eventual chaos to unfold.

At its heart, this is a story about a trans man navigating male and gay male spaces, and it offers one of the most effective depictions of the trans journey and body dysphoria I have seen on stage.

You get what it says on the label: there’s a body swap. Going much further than that would ruin one of the show’s greatest pleasures. What begins with an intriguing premise quickly develops into something intelligent, provocative and surprisingly reflective.

The contemporary script isn’t afraid to examine transphobia within the queer community itself. It explores what it can feel like to be transmasculine within gay male spaces, where acceptance, attraction, identity and belonging can become incredibly complicated. And for those characters responsible for the transphobia? Let’s just say they eventually get a rather substantial taste of their own medicine.

That allows Boobytrapped to explore body dysphoria from a particularly clever perspective. What does it mean to exist in a body that doesn’t feel like yours? How does that affect the way you interact with the world, your relationships and your understanding of yourself? By playing with who gets to inhabit which body, the production finds an accessible theatrical language for something deeply personal.

Both actors deliver strong performances, navigating the comedy and more confronting material without allowing either to overwhelm the other. The script is clever, the storytelling well crafted and the simple set proves that you don’t need enormous production elements when the writing and performances are doing the heavy lifting.

You can understand why Boobytrapped comes from a multi-award-winning production company. It feels considered and confidently put together, with a premise that could easily have become gimmicky instead being used to explore something much more substantial.

Ultimately, it taps into a conundrum almost every queer person encounters in some form: How do I get this life right?

The answer, of course, is that none of us really do.

Booby Trapped gives you exactly what its description promises and then delivers a whole lot more.

★★★★