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An audience is a curious, volatile thing. The audience watching Can I Start Again Please react in fascinating ways; they laugh when it’s seemingly inappropriate, they gasp and grunt to show appreciation and they smile at random. It is a striking testament to the power of Can I Start Again Please that it can evoke such diverse reactions, it is an exercise of interpretation, evaluation and translation that challenges both the relationship between the two performers, but also between the performer and audience.

If Sue MacLaine and Nadia Nadarajah are a painting, the stage their frame, the acrylic duo never physically breach the borders.  The way the two disseminate language is beautifully controlled and devastatingly powerful. For the limitations of language there are Wittgenstein quotes to compensate, golden bells that ring, but sometimes there is nothing. The power of Can I Start Again Please lies in what it does not, cannot, say.

“Lamp, lamp, lamp, lamp.” “If you say it enough times, it is delamped.” Can I Start Again Please explores the limited capacity of the human mind to understand and store what doesn’t fit into pre-established categories. The entire performance doesn’t fit into a binary that can be easily digested; it speaks to weird, un-nurtured emotions, having an intimately personal effect on each audience member.

In a perfect world, where I would be allowed to nitpick to my heart’s content, the actions of the two would be more stylised, the synchronisation more flawless. Perhaps Can I Start Again Please is too raw to be completely impeccable. One speaks as the other signs, the story is told twice at the same time but in completely different ways. The result is startling, Nadarajah is endlessly elegant and the entire production is brimming with the kind of emotion that is organic and completely unforced.

Can I Start Again Please is playing at Summerhall from 18th – 30th August as part  of Edinburgh Festival Fringe. For more information, visit the Fringe website.