Created and performed by Kate Bartlett, this one-woman show is an attempt to bring an emotional void to the stage. 

The set-up is intriguing — the stage is sparsely decorated with a few pieces of furniture and everyday items (a chair, a desk and a toaster). But there is an uncanny quality to the mise-en-scene which goes beyond the obvious (i.e. that it’s on a stage). [More] 

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How would you capture the essence of a person? The memory of a person, the memory of you? The openness of the eyes, each delicate and deliberate reach of an arm, the precise intonation when repeating “I love you too… “ 

You might start by gathering us into a space that feels like comfortably worn-in chaos, like a bedroom, like a place where all the moments that people aren’t really meant to see can happen. You might create a show that is honey rich in tone, honest, and brutal in moments. You might make us laugh. Let us sit at your shoulder as you explain; as you try to figure it out.

Gathered together by an usher, in pink rubber gloves, we are sent up the stairs. Kate Bartlett watches as we enter into a space that is bright with colour, eclectic in set and strangely cosy. The desk has a toaster next to the reading lamp. A potted plant lies on its side next to a sympathetically tumbled waste-paper basket. We settle and Kate moves into the space as comfortably as if it was indeed her own bedroom, the theatre transformed for the duration.

Lit by a desk lamp she explains to us what we might expect. It is candid, like a confession. She is talking to us as if we were another part of her. She places her hands carefully on two slices of toast, records her voice as a memory to come back to, stretches her arm to the light like a tenuous connection to something outside this world into which we have been submersed. Every movement gathers weight, gathers effort. There is nothing in this piece that does not echo with conviction, that is not carefully explored to the edges of possibility. With sharp clarity of voice and action, Kate describes the potential beauty of her body in flight; a scene that unravels into the exquisitely humorous ghost that is the logical conclusion of this thought process. Kate effortlessly mixes humour and fantasy with a carefully clinical examination, teasing out memory via the list written on two china dolphins and the slow inch of a body across the floor.

The structure is episodic and the pace hypnotic, riding along the rhythms of Kate’s words, resting in the spaces between pools of light and shaped by moments of punctuated movement. Details emerge from stillness and layer by layer we uncover the portrait of a woman. At times innocent and eerie, with a blunt, particular honesty and engaging charm, this is a show that will re-shape your internal world, at least for a moment. We all stand with Kate in the front left-hand corner and try to figure it out. Always clean up after yourself, she says, but as we move back towards the entrance/exit it feels like she has strewn my mind with everything that has happened here. It a melancholy and comforting feeling.

If you have ever felt the urge to sigh into the void then this a show you will not want to miss.

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