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.

Following the show there will be an artist talk

Text Gemma Paintin, Deborah Pearson, James Stenhouse | Direction Deborah Pearson, James Stenhouse | Performer Gemma Paintin | Off-Stage Voices Deborah Pearson, James Stenhouse | Soung Design Yas Clarke | Light Design Alex Fernandes | Operator Ruth Green | Set Design Camilla Clarke | Dramaturgy Tania El Khoury | Producer of Action Hero Sarah Warden