Review: SAD-VENTS, VAULT Festival
Photo credit: Joe Twigg
It’s worth asking for the venue’s wifi password before heading into this show. Eleanor Hill’s Sad-Vents is a new one-woman show about death, toxic relationships, anxiety and depression. Pretty heavy stuff, and the list of trigger warnings is hefty, but performer and creator Eleanor Hill treats the most painful, raw and exposing of material with the wry humour and sense of absurdity that makes unfathomable trauma…well, fathomable.
What sets this production aside from another one-person, trauma-dumping confessionals is the innovative use of live video and social media. At the beginning of the show, audiences are invited to follow the play’s Instagram account and – simultaneously to watching the show in person – engage with additional material through Instagram stories and direct messages. This is a fun, quirky and engaging hook, but is also jarring and unsettling at times when we found ourselves sending memes to Eleanor while she re-enacted scenes from her coercive, abusive relationship.
More than a gimmick, Eleanor Hill has touched on a profound truth about the new realities of social media which feed our insecurities but also increasingly have become a bulletin board for our worst days. Hill’s performance is vulnerable, charismatic and unrelenting, and her writing and social media content is unsettlingly funny.
Constance Villemot’s set design is simple – a messy, crusty box-set bedroom. The Cavern at the Vaults – an aptly named yawning railway arch – might seem an unusual choice of venue for this show, and one would expect it to swamp the intimate set of this one-woman show. But all the design elements, combined with Annie McKenzie’s direction, mean that Hill can alternate between bursting out of her dingy bedroom, larger-than-life, and sheltering from the world in her isolated cocoon of depression.
Rachel Sampley’s lighting design is extraordinary, particularly when the length of the damp, cavernous venue is thrown into a blinding, cold white light as Eleanor turns the camera around on her audience.
The next step for Sad-Vents is a prospective Edinburgh Fringe run. If the programmers in the audience at the Vault Festival weren’t won over by this run, it truly is a damning indictment on the death of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
A brilliantly original one-person show – raw, real and delightfully silly.
**** Four stars
Reviewed by: Livvy Perrett
Sad-Vents plays at the VAULT Festival until 3 February, with tickets available here.