Dust review: A morbidly fascinating millennial monologue

Vulnerable: Milly Thomas as Alice, who examines her own corpse in the morgue
Richard Davenport, The Other Richard
Henry Hitchings12 March 2018

This monologue by Milly Thomas is a raw and often very funny look at clinical depression, pitched at audiences in their late teens and twenties. Alice is a wildly profane and loquacious twenty-something with a double-edged gift for masking how unwell she is. Or rather, that’s who she was, because now she is dead — and returns to spy on her family and friends, reviewing their absurdities and her past mistakes.

At the start, stirring on the mortuary slab, she examines her own corpse admiringly — her muscles seem to have the texture of butter and she looks like ‘someone’s fit dead wife from a period drama’. Over the 70 minutes that follow, she maintains this frank and almost churlish air of disconnection, and we gather that during her short life she was just as detached, a creature of the virtual world of social media, able to engage with material reality only when resorting to self-harm.

While the writing is shrewd, its tone will inevitably prove grating for some theatregoers. This is how it’s meant to come across — Alice has a flippancy born of being powerless, in life as in death, but it can veer towards blistering insensitivity.

What’s for sure is that Thomas has a keen eye for revealing detail, whether it’s the judgemental gaze of a doctor who notices she’s slept in her bra or a friend’s antiquated clam-shell phone clacking embarrassingly in her pocket like a pair of castanets. Darker touches include the intrusive thickness of her scar tissue, the maddeningly fiddly cap on her bottle of Temazepam and the former schoolfriends who turn up at her funeral and sneer at the music.

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1/50

Yet it’s as a performer that Thomas impresses most, courageous in portraying vulnerability. In Sara Joyce’s confidently uncluttered production, with a mirrored design by Anna Reid, we're shown several sides of Alice at once and also — literally — some unsettling glimpses of our ourselves.

Until March 17

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