Presented by Action Hero in collaboration with Deborah Pearson

Performed by Gemma Paintin

Review by Josie Rose Embleton

In a small glass booth, Gemma Paintin brings us a myriad of voices. Cleverly co-written by solo performer Paintin, along with Deborah Pearson and James Stenhouse, with the latter as the production’s co-directors and off-stage voices, The Talent is a dazzling peak behind the sounds we hear all day, every day.

The play follows a voice-over artist recording voices and sounds including varying advertisements, computer games and meditation self-help audios. From things you might hear on a television programme, in a horror film, a sci-fi television epic, or a car commercial, in this booth we hear the overwhelming breadth and width of things incessantly sold to us under modern-day capitalism. Throughout are mentions of an onerous backdrop of the outside world, with the off-stage directors’ voices only heard and never seen creating a midst of human isolation. In amongst the electric buzz of the modern technological recordings, the solo presence of the performer brings our sole focus back onto one human voice.

Paintin is captivating, demonstrating an impressive and versatile vocal range, switching effortlessly from one voice to the next, inhabiting its emotion and character, together taking convoluted directions with ease, and portraying utter professionalism throughout. The writing is so clear that while we see only into this one booth, and this one character, a strangely familiar yet mysterious world is created on the outside.

Alex Fernandes’ lighting design becomes a fundamental device to both capture and separate the differing recordings, flickering colours, and intensities to ensure that each script that is read remains distinct. Sometimes also shown are lit-up audio waves as Paintin speaks, breathes, shouts, coughs, cries, and sings into the microphone. Camilla Clarke’s solitary set piece of the recording booth is entirely effective in capturing our attention and Yas Clarke’s sound design fuels the scripts in its backdrop, setting the scene and pace of each recording, as the artists’ vocal delivery is honed to every syllable, beat and word.

A truly unique and mesmerising performance and production, The Talent brings to life what is usually only heard. While centring on one woman, broad ideas and stories lurk, grounded namely in an interesting question of what it means to be human in an increasingly non-human world.