All By Myself – Part of the Main / VAULT Festival London

A wordless one-woman play by Part of the Main, All by Myself takes a bleakly comic look at a social media influencer facing the end of the world.

All By Myself

My second outing to VAULT Festival for 2023 was to see All By Myself, a wordless play for a single actor from theatre company Part of the Main. Part of the Main champion work that is political, provocative and accessible. Will All By Myself fit the bill?

It was the premise of this play that caught my eye amongst the VAULT offerings. A social media influencer is alone in her flat, editing new content. So far, so ordinary. Only, it’s the end of the world. How will she respond as her self-defined purpose slips away?

The set up of All By Myself is bold. An extended opening scene provides the only dialogue, in the form of our influencer (Charlotte Blandford), turned away from us, editing footage she’s shot for her DIY channel on YouTube. She makes reference to something bad happening out there in the world, but tries to stay upbeat. I mean what better time for DIY than when supply chains have failed?

Moving on from this scene, she begins to work on her next project. Making do with what she has (because it sounds like things are already fairly bad out there), she styles each scene carefully, her actions and reactions always mediated through the lens of social media. A comment on her YouTube channel is a rare moment of human contact.

As the external situation gets worse (the tension is increased by the clever use of a projection of the character’s laptop onto a screen) she becomes more frantic, her efforts to keep sending messages out into the void both a way to distract herself and to maintain the identity she has built. But what will happen as the trappings of modern life fail one by one until it’s all gone?

Confronting The End Of The World

It’s an interesting (not to say slightly disturbing) thought. Our lives are so technologically dependent, while at the same time we are facing an increasingly uncertain future where the continuation of our current lives is far from guaranteed. Let’s take this very blog as a case study. Was its relaunch in mid-2020 partly a pandemic coping mechanism? Yes absolutely. Is it a good ongoing distraction from things I would rather not think about? Well, yes you could say that. How would I feel if it were all to be swept away into the technological ether before I had time to reconcile myself to it? Ah, now that’s a good question…

So the aim of creating provocative theatre has been achieved, I think. Political theatre too, in an indirect sense: theatre, as always, is a good way to confront what scares us. Is it accessible? Well, hot off the heels of the London International Mime Festival, I know how accessible wordless theatre can be. All By Myself is all about understanding the character’s inner thoughts through movement and facial expressions. Charlotte Blandford is very expressive, making this an easy task.

I found connection a little more difficult, however. Partly I think that this was a result of the extended on-screen opening scene and the remove created when a character is always acting for social media rather than naturally. Partly it was that the play pushes the experiment perhaps a little too far. This social media influencer certainly talks to herself a lot less than I do on a daily basis, let alone at the end of the world! And the format leaves little room for any back story which would help us get under her skin.

Nonetheless this is an hour well spent to see a creative piece of theatre with just enough comic moments to relieve any onslaught of existential anxiety. Part of the Main have more work on at Vault so check them out here.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3/5

All By Myself on until 12 February 2023