Review: Robin Tran: Don't Look At Me

“People want me to be a role model, but I just want to be a shitty trans woman,” says Robin Tran (no, she didn’t transition for that fun pun) at the top of her Fringe debut. She gets off to a good start with a string of well-worked, knowingly transphobic gags, including a priceless one about her anxieties around taking a poo in women’s toilets.

If anyone is coming to Don’t Look at Me looking for a tortured story of the trans experience they’ll be disappointed. Tran describes herself as “happy-go-lucky” and seems a bit sheepish about not suffering like many of her trans sisters. This isn’t to say life has been a bed of roses, though.

The bulk of the show takes the form of a blow-by-blow rundown of her life before she came out. With inappropriate breeziness, Tran walks us through her tough Asian American upbringing, and it’s a lot: an alcoholic father, a bipolar mother and years of depression, not to mention constantly having to explain to white people the correct pronunciation of Vietnam’s national dish. There’s probably enough trauma here for half a dozen Fringe hours; had she dwelled a bit longer on some of these meaty subjects the show might have felt more substantial.

Perhaps the haste with which Tran explores the darker moments of her life is because she’s an optimist at heart – she predicted the pandemic would be over in a blip, after all. Don’t Look at Me flies by too, but its themes are a bit too scattershot to leave a lasting impression.