Angela Wand: Wounded Animals

Though told through clowning and with a dry wit, Wounded Animals is more of a visceral one-person play than a comedy show.

Wand opens dressed in showy fake fur and sequins, spouting descriptions of dancers, a staircase and other stage glitz as she moves about the empty performance space. But she quickly sheds the outfit—literally casting it off into the crowd—and embarks on an apparently autobiographical journey of set pieces using clowning, song and monologue to tell her story.

It's one that travels from the cool marble-floored Californian church where she made her first confession, through her Alzheimer's-beset mother, her raw guilt over the death of her dog, and moving to Sweden to marry a fellow clown.

From the moment she strips off the stage outfit and comments on the rounded belly it reveals through the more flexible Lycra costume underneath, the show feels intensely honest.

Her life, like most, is full of contradictions. But she owns her hypocrisies – being a bad feminist, being a vegetarian who loves meat, being shocked at her African friend's inability to get Swedish residency yet feeling racial prejudice in response to an incident where she is hit in the face by a black guy in a car park. Some sections are powerfully emotional: her anger after the near sexual assault she witnesses on a train is expressed by wielding whips, literally making you flinch both from the action itself and the wrath that emanates from Wand.

An affecting piece of work.