The Wakeful Chamber, Oran Mor, Glasgow

Mary Brennan, Three stars

For most of us, sleep is the welcome respite that “knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care”. For the woman in The Wakeful Chamber, however, sleep is the source of cares that unstitch her thoughts. They so unnerve her in mind and body, she decides to stay awake not just throughout the hours of darkness but in daytime too.

At first it seems as if Bethan (Kim Allan) has a form of OCD that compels her to map out the positions of the stars using little lights on her attic floor – a handy excuse for keeping sleep at bay. But her rapidly muttered speech suggests an internalised unease that goes beyond ordering the cosmos: Bethan wearies to know where everything “goes” – our memories, our actions, all the stuff we can’t hold on to, maybe missed when we weren’t looking or when (and here anguish sprints up the Richter scale of fretful despair) we are asleep.

When her star-gazing offers no consolation, Bethan’s restless thoughts latch onto alchemy. Still unable to find answers to questions she can hardly frame, she chases after systems and structures in the natural world as a means of grasping why the cycle of light and dark – life and death – exists at all. We begin, gradually, to suspect the trauma that has rendered Bethan so fraught with guilt and grief she cannot let herself sleep. As the enigmatic jigsaw comes together – its revelations potently echoed in Pippa Murphy’s soundscape of edgy, jangling music and collaged ansaphone messages – the nightmare at the heart of Rebecca Sharp’s play of shadows is exposed, like a raw wound. The wild forays into sleepless theories and imaginings emerge – in company with David Rankine’s multi-faceted music-making – as forlorn coping mechanisms we might not share but can sympathise with.

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