Dusty Horne's Sound and Fury

"Do you know what a Foley artist is?" Quite a few hands go up. Which is unfortunate, because this uneven performance doesn't offer much to anyone who's already clued up on the dark arts of cinematic sound. It's ostensibly a lecture given by Dusty Horne, a fictional master of the genre. She explains all her tricks to a captive audience: a tray of gravel to create the sound of footsteps, wind chimes for broken glass, a pleated skirt for the rustle of clothing. 

Dusty Horne is the creation of performer and writer Natasha Pring, who's dived into the undocumented world of female Foley artists to invent a character based on a single old photograph. And she's far from a lovable one. She's a luvvie stereotype, a kind of domineering Fanny Cradock who shamelessly bullies her henpecked ex-husband, throws tantrums and hurls lines from Shakespeare like hand grenades.

Her furious reminiscences ramble through some of the richest decades of British cinema. She crunches, stamps and slams doors along to a hilarious sequence from Hitchcock's 1938 classic The Lady Vanishes – her efforts poignantly invisible to the film's viewers. She drags audience members on stage to have a go at soundtracking early horror flicks, too – snapping celery to imitate a breaking neck, or trumpeting the eerie roar of a giant crab.

But the stories and personalities she's invented don't ring as true as the sounds she creates. And with a character that's as impossibly overblown as Horne, it's hard to embrace her move into the limelight.