The Talent

A woman in a sound booth is talking. She is talking to herself. She is talking to you. She is talking to everyone. She is gifted, professional, mercurial; it seems as if she can summon almost any kind of voice and create any kind of world.

She is selling you something

She is telling you a story

She sounds like a cereal ad

She sounds like a cartoon

She sounds like a meditation tape

She sounds like a shapeshifter

She sounds like the ocean

You would listen to her say anything. Her voice is all around. Her voice is all that’s left. She conjures her own ghost in real time.

—

On stage is a small sound booth; inside it sits a woman, alone. She is a voice-over artist. Off stage, in a space never seen but only heard, two disembodied voices ask her to conjure different voices for commercials, self-help audiobooks, meditation tapes, computer games, robo-calls .... anything and everything. Is she the powerful protagonist in her own narrative, literally building her own reality - and ours too - or is her voice being used to construct something more complicated? It's capitalism's audio debris, a vocal soup that, in a post-apocalyptic world, will continue to be heard for as long as there is electricity.

The Talent is a show about the voice and human presence in the 21st Century. Where does the voice live? How will her voice live on, outside her body, if it can take on a life of its own?

The Talent asks what kind of ghosts will haunt us when we’re gone, and what the legacy of the human voice might be in a non- human future.

Winner of an Off West End award for Best Performance, and shortlisted for Best Production (experimental

theatre), and receiving multiple 4 and 5 star reviews, The Talent sold out its run in London and at the

Edinburgh Festival, and toured all over the UK after its premiere in Lisbon, Portugal.