How to find your voice if you’re losing it

THEATRE

The Silent Treatment

Summerhall (Venue 26), until 28 August

JJJJ

Good singers don’t lose their voices,” Sarah-louise Young reports at the start of this complex, rich and moving autobiographical solo show. The fact that this exceptional and acclaimed performer has suffered from bouts of vocal incapacity throughout her career has therefore been experienced as something of a shameful secret.

For there are also times, we learn, when supposedly good singers don’t use their voices – they refrain from telling stories such as this, for instance, in case it harms their career prospects. And this resonates with how all of us – especially women – are expected to keep quiet about other kinds of pain and trauma for the sake of business as usual.

The Silent Treatment describes how, after years of managing voice loss, Young finally sought a decisive resolution through therapy and surgery – her challenges were both physical and psychological. This process unfolds through a playful mixture of medical explanation, industry talk, metaphorical fable and personal experience, some light-hearted, some grave.

We meet a swashbuckling consultant physician and a cod-viennese analyst, and go on a Fantastic Voyage-style odyssey through the organs. The myth of the little mermaid proves deeply resonant too. This is all nicely complemented by adroit puppetry work involving fabric, props and shadows.

The show aptly showcases Young’s own vocal brilliance and technical control through speech, song and clever use of voiceover. (In her other show at this year’s Fringe, she impressively channels Kate Bush.)

It also mobilises other forms of vocal expression, from tongue-twisting warmups to phone-sex-line techniques, and forms of the unspoken, from non-disclosure agreements to psychological repression.

Ultimately, The Silent Treatment invites us to question the moral imperatives around which kinds of vocalisation are expected and which are taboo, particularly for women and girls.

Sometimes, it insists, “there is a silence worth listening to”.

BEN WALTERS