A recording of female breath breezes over a lightly-pounding beat. Pages from Fifty Shades of Grey flutter to the floor as a serious, eerily calm Hannah Silva tears them with her teeth. She eyes the audience as they take their seats. Striking, ethereal and undeniably weird, Schlock! begins as it intends to go on.

This is my hunch: Silva doesn’t much like the best-selling, controversial, overly-culturally-referenced Fifty Shades of Grey. Passive, resigned, docile and tame are just some of what she labels as “synonyms” to the book’s title. So, she rips the novel to shreds with more than just her teeth, intertwining its words with her heroine Kathy Acker’s novel In Memoriam to Identity. This juxtaposition of two influential texts leaves Fifty Shades of Grey even more suspect and shallow, with In Memoriam to Identity towering over it. While E.L James’s novel condones, celebrates or perhaps cannot even recognise coercion and manipulation, Ackler’s tackles them.

Fragments of both novels are projected onto the stage’s back wall, whilst Silva speaks them with subtle, critical twists: saying “she” instead of “he”, “the child” instead of “the cancer”, “submissive” instead of “mother”. Throughout, the abusive language of Fifty Shades of Grey is manipulated to create the desolation Silva felt when reading it, until it is hard to imagine why or how the original novel lit commercial, populist fireworks. Music shifts between beats and moods, whilst Silva’s loop-pedalled voice carries emotion remarkably intensely. The take-home feeling is pain: she lists every sentence with the word “pain” in Fifty Shades of Grey, repeatedly asks “how much pain are you willing to experience?”, and explores the pain of childbirth, breast cancer – as told by the well-renowned Acker – and the tumultuous, sometimes ungrateful treatment of a mother by their child.

Silva teases us with strands of ideas, thoughts and moods, rather than encouraging linear or step-by-step thinking. Her signing and the projected text, she explains, is for the hard of hearing or deaf audience. It emerges that this is as much of a theatrical experiment as an access issue: sometimes she signs and doesn’t speak, sometimes she speaks and doesn’t sign, and sometimes she does both. The deaf and hearing audience would have a completely different experience. Mostly this kind of dissonance is captivating, but sometimes the confusion breaks the pleasantly misty atmosphere. Wondering whether something is deliberate or a technical fault becomes distracting: at times, Silva speaks in perfect harmony with the projected text – but only at times.

Even in moments of vagueness or silence, Schlock! is powerful and strange enough to trigger imaginations. While everything is open to interpretation, this unlikely tangle of three women’s words might even seem a completely different genre to the next person. But this malleability is its beauty: it is irresistibly evocative to any audience.

Schlock! played at The Albany until 11 November. For more information, see Hannah Silva’s website. Photo: Field and McGlynn.