How To Avoid Making An Entrance of Yourself[author-post-rating] (3/5 stars)

I’ve been listening to Dot Howard speak for nearly an hour now. I’ve had her words in my mouth. I’ve seen her tongue emerge, red and real, through a brown paper bag, I’ve seen her wedding ring and even her underwear. I’ve drawn a charcoal sketch of her body and she rated it 7/10. But I still haven’t seen her face. That’s because How to Avoid Making An Entrance of Yourself does exactly what it says on the tin: in a show about avoidance and anxiety, absences and audiences, it’s us who take the stage (not quite literally) so that Dot really doesn’t have to.

It’s heartfelt and honest stuff, performance art with none of the pretensions that the genre, victim of so many misconceptions, is wrongfully ridiculed for. The set looks like its accidentally been constructed wrongly, as if it’s us backstage, waiting to go on. There are blank wooden walls and a rail of faux-glamorous ball gowns glimmer like a makeshift red curtain. “No-one here apart from the theatre technician is a professional,” Howard reminds us, a reprieve for both her and the audience. Loose ideas jostle together without much forward momentum, but there’s a lovely sense of mess and make-do about it. It’s strange how intimate you can get, how affectionate you can start to feel towards someone you’ve never even properly seen, never mind known. It’s easy because Howard demands nothing but a little complicity, a little patience. Even if she hides backstage, or behind a smiling cipher who signs her words for us, she has no qualms about owning up to her anxieties, even if she can’t overcome them. Our hour with Howard (or without her, as the case may be) is an endearing and unexpected experience because it lets us play together. “Close your eyes,” she tentatively asks us at one point. “I know it’s annoying to be asked to do stuff but… I don’t want you to be disappointed.” We all willingly oblige.

Of course, there’s nothing particularly devastating really going on here, and any concrete sense of Howard’s overall intention is uncertain to say the least. Our interest does wane at times, and some aspects of the show are simply clumsy rather than unpretentious, so I imagine this show will frustrate just as many as it delights. See for yourself. Though How to Avoid… may well be very much a work-in-progress, it shows no end of promise.

How to Avoid Making An Entrance of Yourself is playing at the Pleasance Hunt and Darton Cafe as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival until August 25. For more information and tickets, please visit the Edinburgh Fringe Festival website.