This is a one-to-one show that requires you to get up-close to its sole performer, Oliver Ayres. He leads you in, puts you at ease, and offers to tuck you into a bed in the room (there is an option to keep sitting if you prefer).
The show is a combination of recorded monologue, music and physical theatre. Words and music pour into your head through headphones. Ayres speaks of an unnamed illness that leaves him in acute pain. He is later diagnosed with the rare and severe chronic immune condition called Stevens-Johnson syndrome, although it is not named in the recording. It leaves Ayres disabled and his story speaks of his nearness to death at the age of 20. In the course of his emergency admission, a doctor puts his atypical symptoms down to the testosterone that Ayres is taking (he is trans). It is a dissonant moment, not dwelt on, but it buzzes with alarm. Ayres adds to the story through occasional, oblique, movement.
An award-winning show from Melbourne, it is experimental in nature, not explaining itself or imposing meanings. Still, you realise you are sitting in a hospital bed – possibly his? For me, it is about his pain, loneliness, the horror of an unnamed illness – and the horror of being judged, maybe condemned, by a doctor.
There is a narrow partition screen with images projected on it but it serves as a mirror, too; Ayres sits on a chair on one side while you are on the other. It brings you closer to his experience. There is direct eye contact. Symbolically, you cannot look away from the story.
Then it is over, possibly too soon, with questions left dangling. One detail that returns is the doctor’s assumption that Ayres’ illness was caused by the taking of testosterone. I ask about this and the answers he gives turns it into a show about transphobia and its effects, alongside its more existential themes.
It is a reckoning, of sorts, although there is an emotional intangibility there. I walk out feeling an affinity with Ayres but also with a need to know more. I would have liked to have carried on talking.
At the Traverse, Edinburgh, until 24 August