The Talent by Action Hero & Deborah Pearson

A woman in a sound booth is talking. She is talking to herself. She is talking to you. She is talking to everyone. She is gifted, professional, mercurial; it seems as if she can summon almost any kind of voice and create any kind of world.

She is selling you something

She is telling you a story

She sounds like a cereal ad

She sounds like a cartoon

She sounds like a meditation tape

She sounds like a shapeshifter

She sounds like the ocean

You would listen to her say anything. Her voice is all around. Her voice is all that’s left. She conjures her own ghost in real time.

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.

Commissioned by Teatro do Bairro Alto (PT) Cambridge Junction (UK) & South Street Arts/ University of Reading (UK). With support from PACT Zollverein (DE) and Bristol Old Vic Ferment (UK). Thanks to Queen Mary University, University of Bristol and The Yard. With funding from Arts Council England.

actionhero.org  ¦  Instagram  ¦  Facebook ¦  YouTube  ¦  Vimeo

deborahpearson.com  ¦  X

This show is eligible for New Adelphi Season Ticket use!

WARNINGS: Suitable for ages 12+. Contain flashing lights, mild language, some humorous discussion of death

ADMISSION: Pay What You Can.

Pay What You Can is an ‘honesty box’ for the theatre. We and the artists will continue to programme and produce high quality events and ask you to pay what you can afford.

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