★★★★
Holly Sewell’s Dazzling is an honest, raw look at spiralling mental health and the resulting patterns of self-destructive behaviour. When I saw it, the company’s understudy, Alix Addinall, delivered the piece with a nuanced duality, refusing to give up on their impossibly perfect dreams, whilst also refusing to confront her steady descent into depression and her own toxic effect on her close circle.
A one-person show told entirely from their bedroom, Alix skilfully builds the world and characters around her, and reveals themself as an iconic unreliable narrator. Their own internal monologue of finding freedom from the mundane and chasing their dreams of a wild romance with her love (or obsession?) Fiona is convincing enough to feel aspirational; but the cleverness of the writing means that the audience is never allowed to forget Alix’s inner turmoil, they are depressed, they are an alcoholic, and they are clinging so tightly onto the people in their life who make them happy that they become suffocating.
The abstract, stitched-together nature of Alix’s narrative did leave her emotional journey a bit muddled in places, but as she herself suggests in the final scene, that time in her life was a blur. The snippets of poetry add rhythm and flow to the whole piece, contributing to a brutally honest story of a young person who outwardly feels, cares and exists with a magnetic vibrance but is using it as a life raft; her sense of self-worth sinking lower until they hit rock bottom.
Dazzling is on at The Space until August 22nd
Review by Rachel Elphick
