Can You Hear Me Running?

In 2008, Louise Breckon-Richards lost her voice. Not in the have-a-Strepsil-and-it-will-feel-better-tomorrow-way, but completely. This loss was caused by a rare condition and it meant that Breckon-Richards, a musical theatre performer and television actor, was unable to work.

In Can You Hear Me Running?, her new one-woman show, she takes us through her experiences – the deterioration and slow recovery of her voice. The piece itself is the culmination of her rehabilitation.

White boxes, tall and small, are stacked – crammed – into the Pleasance’s upstairs space for Steve Grihault’s production, against which Breckon-Richards’ story comes alive. Nifty projection and video design and smart use of sound and music elevate her experiences into something more substantially theatrical.

A frank, assured performer, she slips between playing herself and the other characters in her story with ease, faltering only occasionally, in the few times the writing – by Jo Harper with Breckon-Richards – leaves her overexposed.

Drawn from blog posts and diary entries, the narrative is threaded around a rehabilitation process that is exemplified by her discovery of running – hence the play’s title. She is empowered and strengthened through running at a time when other parts of her body are failing her. While it is this that is delivered as the intended message of the piece, the real poignancy comes in its exposure of the fragility of our voice – how it defines us far more than we may realise – and the difficulty of adjusting to a life in which our voice lost or altered.