Besides me, the modest audience comprised exclusively of people 'of a certain age'. Melissa Cloake has devised and here performs this one-woman show in which she promises an exploration of her difficult past, handling failed relationships, incest, sexuality and her ability to overcome her problems through the release of singing.The problems begin when she opens her mouth and starts to sing - so, right at the beginning. Her voice is untrained and not particularly strong; it falters frequently and has no interesting or redeeming attributes, pitch aside. Cloake lacks the charisma, the presence, the chutzpah, to fill and command the stage by herself for a full hour. She is timid and looks out of place up there, confidence somehow dried up. I wondered if this was all part of the emotion of the piece, the frailty of her standing there in a pretty crimson dress, but many a line was fluffed in what is the second main problem: when she isn't singing, but speaking.The script has clearly been memorised as though this were a play, when it needed to be more of a flexible series of points to be related, so as not to feel contrived. At no point does it feel as though Cloake is speaking spontaneously or genuinely, so, combined with the total absence of eye contact throughout, a barrier remains between performer and audience, no connection established. In fact, our 'Pollyanna' periodically switches to rhymed verse, drawing on archaic language to force the rhymes, and this cements the piece as performative and not naturalistic, a poor choice for such an intimate and personal subject matter. The narrative is rambling, devoid of direction and humour.A whole song was sung with Cloake's head resting on a chair; by this point I envied her something rotten, my neck and eyes beginning to hurt as I fought the overwhelming desire to sleep.All things considered, the show was a bit of a car-crash, my open-mindedness and resolution to appreciate the show defeated by pure mediocrity.
