I’m Ready To Talk Now Review – Unsettling Bedtime Story For An Audience Of One

This is simply a one-to-one show that requires you to get up-close to its sole performer, Oliver Ayres. He leads you in, puts you astatine ease, and offers to tuck you into a furniture successful nan room (there is an action to support sitting if you prefer).

The show is simply a operation of recorded monologue, euphony and beingness theatre. Words and euphony move into your caput done headphones. Ayres speaks of an unnamed unwellness that leaves him successful acute pain. He is later diagnosed pinch nan uncommon and terrible chronic immune information called Stevens-Johnson syndrome, though it is not named successful nan recording. It leaves Ayres abnormal and his communicative speaks of his nearness to decease astatine nan property of 20. In nan people of his emergency admission, a expert puts his atypical symptoms down to nan testosterone that Ayres is taking (he is trans). It is simply a dissonant moment, not dwelt on, but it buzzes pinch alarm. Ayres adds to nan communicative done occasional, oblique, movement.

An award-winning show from Melbourne, it is experimental successful nature, not explaining itself aliases imposing meanings. Still, you realise you are sitting successful a infirmary furniture – perchance his? For me, it is astir his pain, loneliness, nan scary of an unnamed unwellness – and nan scary of being judged, possibly condemned, by a doctor.

Photograph: Dijana Risteska

There is simply a constrictive partition surface pinch images projected connected it but it serves arsenic a mirror, too; Ayres sits connected a chair connected 1 broadside while you are connected nan other. It brings you person to his experience. There is nonstop oculus contact. Symbolically, you cannot look distant from nan story.

Then it is over, perchance excessively soon, pinch questions near dangling. One item that returns is nan doctor’s presumption that Ayres’ unwellness was caused by nan taking of testosterone. I inquire astir this and nan answers he gives turns it into a show astir transphobia and its effects, alongside its much existential themes.

It is simply a reckoning, of sorts, though location is an affectional intangibility there. I locomotion retired emotion an affinity pinch Ayres but besides pinch a request to cognize more. I would person liked to person carried connected talking.

At nan Traverse, Edinburgh, until 24 August