In Told by an Idiot's new offering, A Little Fantasy, four wordless works in progress explore love and loss in various guises. The two performers, Hayley Carmichael and Lisa Hammond, use very few props to indicate time and place, and with no spoken word, their work is simply evoked.
In Oh, Good Grief, a friendship is struck up between the inhabitants of rooms either side of a dividing wall, Hammond's longing for a reciprocal knock goes unanswered, and what appears to be a friendly game soon has tragic consequences. After You is a passionate declaration of unrequited love in which the heart is literally ripped from its casing and proffered to the astounded beloved.
The setting for the performance is a mirror image of the audience's space – a bank of tiered seating. It's not until the final piece in the selection that this effect is utilised by the two performers, when the seating predictably becomes a cinema and then, more imaginatively, a coastal path leading to a beach. The development of a friendship and the devastating effects of loss and ensuing grief are demonstrated through a scenario which shifts from cinema to beach and back again.
However, until this piece the seating looms inert and redundant. As a weighty backdrop to the work it highlights the fact that the pieces are still very much in their formative stages and, while well performed, remain underdeveloped improvisations. Although the pieces were advertised as ‘works in progress' I felt let down and annoyed by what I saw and the request for audience feedback in the bar after the show compounded this.