Running on Empty is Probe’s small scale experimental dance theatre show at Soho Theatre, created by a collaborative team including a writer, a choreographer, and a songwriter. This combination of voice, song, live music, dance, and story is a mix of fantasy and reality between a man and a woman, adrift in an elusive dreamtime. She is dreaming. He is dead.

After a beautiful delicate opening song, we slip into restless images, danced, performed, and spoken between Antonia Grove and Greig Cooke. The soundscape created live by Scott Smith, at times chilling and at others embracing, carries us breezing through from one chapter to another. Particularly memorable scenes were of the couple being adrift on a raft, of balance and counter balance, of who can save whom. I was engrossed by a vibrant sequence of animal spirit guides, a change of pace that opened up an atmosphere of vast plains and eternity. I enjoyed Scott Smith’s spoken interjections which gave respite, adding a touch of humour to the male-female wrangling duets.

At times strident, then lyrical, and then exhaustive, with both dancers left on the floor panting phrases such as ‘the more you struggle, the more you sink’, Running on Empty is a moody, melancholic, and tender piece about love, loss, memory, and the complexities of human relationships.

I found myself dreaming of what’s gone by, and left with the three words swift, clear, and rich.