Can I Start Again Please is a challenging performance about the capacity of language to represent traumatic experience, particularly childhood sexual abuse. It is never going to be an easy watch, and is made more challenging by a text Beckettian in its complexity and playfulness.

The text demands focus and is counterpointed by the simplicity of the staging. The two performers, Sue MacLaine and Nadia Nadarajah, sit side by side. Some piles of books surround them, on top of which are placed a number of brass bells. The story is physically present on a ream of paper that, beginning folded in the centre of the two, is unfolded during the course of the performance revealing at its core blank pages. No text. Silence.

The performers refer to quotes from the philosopher Wittgenstein to guide the story along, and these are presented to the audience written on large pieces of paper. One is particularly prevalent: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”.

This performance tests the limits of language and its main theatrical device is there to do this. For most of this play Nadarajah speaks in English and British Sign Language while MacLaine uses the spoken word. It is, however, often unclear who is leading the story: is MacLaine interpreting Nadarajah or vice versa? This question is beautifully echoed in the costume design, with MacLaine in a gown that flows from dark to light and Nadarajah from light to dark. The two bleed into each other, as do their words. What it means to interpret something is questioned by frequent repetition of the phrase “I’ll pause whilst this is interpreted”. Both performers sit looking out at us whilst we, the audience, interpret what has been said.

The text is punctuated by moments of movement and physical gesture. Signing bleeds into stylised gesture, demonstrating that sometimes the body can communicate what words cannot. The abuse at the centre of the story is delicately touched on, but hardly spoken of outright at all. Again, the performers come up against the limits of language, but at least they are breaking their silence.

In such a tough story humour is a necessity, and Can I Start Again Please has plenty of it. The sharing of the idiom “singing from the same hymn sheet”, and subsequent questioning of the need to explain an idiom, is one example. The humour here gently leads into one of the main points of the story: people who’ve suffered from abuse tend to be forced into singing from the same hymn sheet as their abuser about what has happened. The example given: “she fell over”.

In positioning themselves on stage to look like storytellers of old, MacLaine and Nadarajah contextualise their story within a tradition of how we tell (or don’t tell) stories about abuse. In presenting Can I Start Again Please they rupture this tradition by placing into question the very language through which these stories are told. Upon leaving the performance, I did wonder if it might be a bit too clever. It probably doesn’t matter if you don’t know who Wittgenstein is, but I feel a lot of the deeper meaning of this performance is embedded in a knowledge of his work. With this thought, however, comes an exciting prospect; after leaving the auditorium an audience member may be tempted to read up more on Wittgenstein, and in this way the performance continues to unfold itself long after the show is over, and to me that’s an example of brilliant artistry.

Can I Start Again Please played at the Brighton Dome as part of the Brighton Festival, and is touring the UK from May-July. For more information, see Sue MacLaine’s website.