Review: LITTLE SCRATCH, New Diorama

Less a stream of consciousness and more a flowing river, Katie Mitchell's adaption of Rebecca Watson's beguilingly experimental novel little scratch (stylised in lower case) is one of the more demanding experiences you can have in a London theatre. It premiered at Hampstead Theatre in 2021 and has now transferred to the indie powerhouse that is the New Diorama.

Its form is deliberately impregnable: four performers stand in a row facing the audience lit by four dangling lamps. They speak, sometimes in unison, sometimes over each other. Their voices become instruments in an orchestra, together amplifying a single indivisible melody.

They are conscious threads of thought in a woman's head as she goes about a seemingly banal day. We hear her routine, bed, brushing teeth, boyfriend, commute, work. But soon the unnamed woman finds herself defending herself from flickers of neuroses that sparkle and flash in her internal conversations with herself.

As her day progresses it becomes apparent that the anxiety has already scaled the walls of her psyche, bruised trauma lingers cancerously and manifests in habitually scratching. She struggles to conceptualise the trauma of workplace sexual assault and cannot decide how to tell her boyfriend that she has been raped.

From a technical standpoint it's a masterclass in performance and storytelling. The intense aesthetic austerity shifts power to Melanie Wilson's sleek sound design to evoke environments, both internal and external. Sometimes sounds are organic, made with props performed as if the stage where a foley studio. Sometimes ambient hums emanate from speakers, swallowing the room in portentous menace.

It's that sound design that is the lynchpin between her inner and outer worlds. The audience have privileged access to the former where each internal tension can be picked up and felt. There is something tactile about it all; it's like an interactive exhibit that we must reach out to in order to experience, it is up to us to fill in the blanks and paint scenes in our minds' eye like a theatrical Rorschach test.

Sometimes it is best to close one's eyes and let yourself be carried away in the force of its current. But writer Miriam Battye, alongside Mitchell, doesn't make this easy. The script is washed in deliberate vagueness and often numbingly mundane descriptions of everyday existence.

At times the language is disengaging but it's terseness is vital. This is not a heightened narrative or grandiose melodrama. It's quotidian, and terrifyingly so because of the distressing ubiquity of sexual assault in the workplace. little scratch will burrow under the skin, but only if you allow it to.

little scratch runs at the New Diorama until 13 May

Photo Credit: Ellie Kurttz

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