Nel

Foley’s an old Fringe fascination – a way of conjuring big fictions from everyday objects without pretence or expense. It’s inherently theatrical, but you rarely see it as fully—or as playfully—deployed as in Nel.

Squeaking hot water bottles become screeching brakes. Scissors scrape cardboard like roaring lions. Bones break as teeth crunch pasta. And rubber gloves flap into whole flocks of birds. It’s enough to stretch your smile ear to ear.

A Foley artist herself, Sian Keen’s Nel is a fantasist. She has to be – she turns ordinary stuff into extraordinary sounds. But dreamers are escapists too, and Nel shuts herself safely away at home, afraid of leaving her own little world. Neither her cat nor her goldfish will judge her for being a social clutz.

If emerging company Scratchworks struggle to sustain Nel’s story—it drifts into sentimental friends-forever goo, skimming the realities of anxiety disorder—they do so with an infectious and inventive style. Hanora Kamen’s ukulele numbers do the narrative legwork, as a three-strong chorus wrestle Nel into her raincoat and out of her front door.

Her way of life chimes with her art. She’s unfussed by material things, and tries to be something she’s not. Mostly though, Nel’s content to be part of life’s background noise; at her best when she goes unnoticed. You warm to her hugely, this British Amélie, but, despite a tantalising glimpse of a difficult childhood, we never really discover what makes Nel tick.