Are You Lonesome Tonight

Do you know what your life path number is? Or your destiny number? My life path number, I discover, is one – the same as Tom Cruise's, or so I'm told. But does this really matter? The answer, most definitely is no. But that's not really the point of Ellie Stamp's intimate performance. It's the effort expended in trying to make sense of her forays into cod numberology which provides this theatrical tangle of ideas with some sort of payoff.

Stamp has thrown an awful lot into the mix here: Elvis (and his love of bizarre numerology); a framing narrative around a schizophrenic for whom she was an informal carer (and their belief that she is the great rock 'n' roller's secret love-child); the odd song; a bit of cooking; an informal smattering of cognitive neuroscience. In reality, it's a unmanageable number of plates, kept spinning largely by charm alone. Stamp is a kind and engaging host, with enough charisma to lead an audience willingly through somewhat nonsensical experiments. Of course we can't be definined by numbers. And my similarities to Tom Cruise are vanishingly few. But there's fun to be had in entertaining those possibilities.

As a piece about mental health and the line between sanity and delusion, Are You Lonesome Tonight is possibly more of a conversation starter than a game-changer. There are chinks of clarity here: a finale in which Stamp claims the myriad identities of audience members for herself, for instance. It's an uplifting case for the infinite possibilities and malleability of identitity – surely a more humane alternative to a medical model which diagnoses that multiplicity as deviant?