Jesus Queen of Heaven still changing lives after 10 years on the road

For Natalia Mallo, it all began on a jet-lagged evening in August 2014, when she had just arrived from Sao Paulo to seek inspiration around the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe for her work as a musician, curator and theatre producer in Brazil. She already had a ticket for an Edinburgh International Festival show that night; but a friend persuaded her to change her plans, and go to St Mark’s Unitarian Church on Castle Terrace, to see the final late-night performance of Jo Clifford’s solo play, The Gospel According To Jesus, Queen Of Heaven. The show is a kind of communion service, in which Clifford – one of Scotland’s leading trans artists, and a playwright who has written more than a hundred performed plays, in a career stretching back to the early 1980s – invites the audience to imagine the message of love at the heart of the Christian faith extending to embrace all those traditionally excluded because of their sexuality or gender, and to imagine Jesus himself – or herself – in the form of a trans woman; and Mallo was enthralled.