Framed as an experimental collaboration between performance artists and costume designer, this show appears not quite as sold. Rather than accoutrements assembled before our eyes in tandem with the action, this is twenty-five minutes of one (already clad) woman talking. An entirely valid dramaturgy, just not what the marketing had led me to expect.

Sullivan’s costume, almost a character in itself, is some kind of troubadour tapestry seen from (relatively) afar which goes unremarked and unexamined. That’s a great shame as it seems fascinating. I identified some words, standard flags, and emblems. There was plenty more I couldn’t identity, all of which must have had layers of meaning behind it. There is some kind of story underlying it all, but we never get to hear it.

The elaborately embroidered outfit is a robust metaphor for hidden anger, carried around even in the meekest of people, researched by Sullivan in work with academics to land her creative exploration of the emotion in biology, psychology, and sociology. The embodiment of the anger, the force and the noise, is revealed at the last, at the point where it seemed the performance was just getting going, and we were getting to the crux of things. I wait for Sullivan’s return to the stage, for the premise to come into its own. The lights come up. The audience applaud. We file out into the bar.

There are technical plaudits due: Sullivan has an exemplary level of control over the volume and pitch of her voice, of the most miniature of muscular movements – she can escalate an imperceptible sound or motion into cacophony by subtle increments, and the simple but immaculately executed lighting design reflects that. She is by all means a thoughtful and accomplished performer. With that in mind, there could be far more to this production. But maybe that is the nature of rage, our experience of it can never be explicable to another.