It’s 1pm, time to press Play on my MP3 player. The friendly voice in my ears asks if I’ve come alone? I am instructed to go sit in a quiet place on the Brighton station concourse, away from others, where I can notice the man with the newspaper, the woman sending a text, farewells and greetings, couples, groups and the solitary traveller – players paused between departing and arriving. I’m invited to explore and experiment, and to take time to simply notice the everyday, the mundane, the serendipitous moment, the precious instance, the beauty and the tat.

Nova Pitch’s twenty-minute interactive audio performance piece If I Ruled the World is an earful of lovely writing – clear and warm and engaging, with relevant moments of music. There’s enough time to pause, to ponder, to see and imagine. What stories are going on in the suspended pause between here and there, as we wait for life to move on? What happens in the moment, what do you notice, what do I notice? The florist. The person in the photo booth. Can you smell the coffee? All the action, all the players, are all around; and we are part of it ourselves. Amongst this hyper-real 360 degree film set is one performer – submerged within the everyday activities and places of this station concourse, so that I’m quite taken aback when she turns and I realise I’m now watching an actor. Through the headphones we hear her thoughts and drifting snatches of her story.

At the end, there is an act of public dancing, then the story concludes like a daydream. A bubble of my own imagination pops, and suddenly I’m snapped back into the everyday world. Yet haven’t I just been in the everyday world? I haven’t been in a theatre. I’ve been in a world within a world within a very public space that’s also private; in my own head, yet part of an experience shared with the other audience members. We have each been in our own story-engineered world, yet all intertwined; individual, yet on parallel journeys. An enrapturing, moving and extremely rich experience.