Someone Else's ShoesA group of over-exuberant tour guides kick-start Trailblaze Theatre’s walking tour of Brighton Someone Else’s Shoes. Quite the stereotype, but these characters work. We are in a comfortable environment and at ease, this is fun and these characters are enjoyable to spend time with. Sadly we don’t spend much time with them other than our introductory session being split into three groups and given our pink audio guides from Tesco. We set off in different directions, supposedly on the same tour, and what followed was an hour of participatory tasks that left me at a bit of a loss.

My group’s tour got off to a wobbly start with some technical issues, but these can be forgiven. Kudos to a young company for working with such an ambitious format as this with fairly limited resources, it’s just a shame the story offered doesn’t quite fulfil this project’s ambition. We follow the directions our audio guide gives us – accompanied by meaningless chatter about the streets we’re on – it transpires (of course) that the three groups aren’t on the same tour. Our guide stops us by a lamppost and I think my audio has broken again until we are met by an actor dressed how the most annoying of Brightonians like to adorn themselves. A hippy drawing on the wall in chalk, her character is a student who has somehow misplaced her friend in the streets of Hove and we are now roped in to help find her. Off we go listening to this highly irritating student talk, helping her complete fairly meaningless and arbitrary tasks on this quest.

I understand the principle of the show is to experience part of the city in someone else’s shoes for an hour, and this subject of shoes is thrown into our student’s narrative in a rather haphazard way. She has a project due in for her art degree and she wants to do it about shoes because they can say so much.  We draw pictures on the pavement in chalk for her, follow her into a pub toilet to see some graffiti and salvage her stuff that has been thrown out of her room onto the street. At the end of the tour, with all three audience groups reunited – others wearing masks and feather boas (I wonder what they got up to?) – we all join together to write our shoe memories on a piece of paper and pin it to a string.

Memories drawn from shoes hanging on a line together strung across Brighton’s bandstand. It’s a nice image and it could be poignant if only the build up to it had felt more significant. Someone Else’s Shoes is a cute and quirky little show and might be right up your street, but it didn’t do anything for me. If I’m going to wander for an hour in the cold I want to feel it has a clear purpose, that it’s really offering me a new experience as an audience member. The narrative and participatory tasks of this show didn’t give me any feeling other than annoyance, they didn’t have enough drive behind them. I’d like to have seen more of the tour guide characters from the start and experienced a narrative that conveyed a stronger sense of what the show was all about.

Someone Else’s Shoes is playing Brighton Fringe until 2 June. For more information and tickets, see the Brighton Fringe website.