One of the wonderful mysteries of art is the way in which a work will somehow express the zeitgeist of a time in a way that is difficult to quantify or even express in anything like a satisfactory manner. The present offering from Bristol based producers, Action Hero, is just such a work. ‘The talent’ is the term used by production companies, video and advertising outfits and the like, when referring to voice artists, actors, talented people who bring something unique to a sound or voice-over project.

People familiar with Toast of London, which aired on Channel 4 will know the setup of recording booth with microphones separated from the producers in the production suite by a glass panel. The Talent, falls somewhere between Toast of London and Beckett’s Not I, in which a mouth is the only visible thing on stage. The talent in this piece is Gemma (Gemma Paintin) who is not obviously separated from the production booth, but possibly from the world or reality or the present – we don’t know. The disembodied voices of the producers would occasionally break up, leaving us to wonder if they were actually connected to real people or merely the audio remnants of a defunct epoch. Is Gemma even real; at one point she sits motionless like a mannequin?

Ideas and gobbets of script tumble out with no discernible connection to each other. The demands of the producers become ludicrous and surreal; requests for a “scary clam”, a “baby beaver”, a voice that expresses the accent which describes travelling over the border between France and Germany and voices which express being killed by a variety of unlikely means. All are dealt with by Gemma with a professional equanimity that one might marvel at. The point, I surmised, was that we are being manipulated on a daily basis by people who analyse the subtlest of meanings carried in a tone of voice.

Strangely for a show set in a box roughly the size of an upturned Mini it is not without visual interest, a fact which testifies to careful direction. Again the multicolour lighting design of Alex Fernandes utilizes the geometric sound baffles in the recording booth to bring a variety of moods into the box. The kaleidoscope of lighting effects is a match for the emotional and imaginative workout that Gemma, the eponymous talent is dealt.

The clarity and precision of her characterizations and business like demeanour with which she resets after each ‘take’ speak to the actress’s skill. It is by any measure a remarkable performance and alone justifies the price of a ticket.