Dublin Fringe Festival 2025: Testo

Chris O'Rourke
Sep 10
3 min read

Updated: Sep 11

*Testo by Wet Mess. Image by Lesley Martin*

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From the program blurb you might think Testo was about being trans. You'd be right, and you'd be wrong. Or that it's about gender fluidity. Again, right and wrong. That it's about the body as a site of performance. You know what I'm going to say to that one. Indeed, Testo is about all these things. But it’s also about celebrating difference, resilience and discovery. Mostly, it’s about Wet Mess. A singularly gifted artist who rejoices in pushing at the boundaries of performance and drag.

Not that you’d think so early on. Standing, holding a subtitle board, Wet Mess treats us to a dull recounting of what resembles a chem-sex wet dream, or nightmare if you’re lactose intolerant, which labours under cliches. Immediately followed by a Chippendale half strip, revealing a chiselled, rubber male torso married to a maniacal smile. A chess board face, part Thom McGinty’s Diceman, part Peter Greenaway movie, part Hellraiser is, like their body, a mask. Testo beginning to feel like dance floor cabaret with touches of TikTok Theatre, exaggerated balloon animals, lip syncing to confessional voiceovers, drag brunch shenanigans and phallic fascination. The Testo of the title referring to testosterone, initially reduced to its cliché double bind of violence and sexual intensity. You could be forgiven for getting bored. But Wet Mess is setting you up for a fall from the catwalk. And what magnificent fall it is.

Testo by Wet Mess. Image by Lesley Martin

Peeling away the rubber torso like a shedded skin, Wet Mess reveals another, fleshed feminine form concealed underneath. Yet even revealtion is a performance. Indeed, Testo is all performance. Sex as performance. Gender as performance. Trans as performance. Identity as performance. Performance as performance. The subjective experience framed as objective reality. When all that either really amounts to is the limited information gathered by our five senses and our interpretation of same. Performance proving as pliable as the skin we wear. As restrictive as much as it is expressive. Limited in choice by societal norms. As Wet Mess toys coquettishly with a handbag, we’re back in expected gender roles. But Wet Mess suddenly strips bear, shattering all roles, along with all sexualised gendered gazes, with an unvarnished display of exhibitionism that's electric to behold.

Dropping into the splits everything stops momentarily, allowing something powerful emerge in the silence. Donning a coat Wet Mess sits quietly in the audience. Some laugh uneasily. Presently they rearrange their phallic balloon animals into a recliner, removes their socks and lie outstretched with a drink. A feminine form in a rather masculine pose. As they rises and walk away naked do we, for the first time, glimpse the performer behind the performance? Surtitles tell us this is not a dream. That we are afraid. But we are awake. Alas, dreaming someone else's dream is still a dream. We're still afraid, but perhaps of different things. The body might be stripped of costuming, but the mask remains and has never slipped. So no, we're not awake. But Testo has certainly disturbed our sleep. Shattering boundaries in a vibrantly energetic production in which private worlds are made public. Yet who, or what remains when the audience is gone? When the performance is over? Thought provoking and electrifying, Testo hits you as a visceral experience. For over 18s and non-puritans only. Though it’s probably the latter who need to see Testo the most.