It is 1990, and Trish is living alone in a gritty, postmodern Gothic warehouse studio – once a coffin factory, opposite a slaughterhouse – in Toronto. Returning from her job at an art gallery, she notices her key sticking in the lock, but dismisses the thought. A week later, she senses that someone has been inside. A strip of photo-booth pictures she had left out is missing. Assuming she misplaced it, she replaces the strip. For days it remains untouched, reassuring her that it was all in her imagination – until it disappears again.
She changes the locks, hangs heavy curtains, and mentally inventories her neighbours – an upholsterer, a ceramic artist – all seemingly trustworthy. Taking further precautions, she tapes a hair across the doorway, Mission Impossible style, only to discover that someone has been on her bed. In her underwear drawer lies lingerie she never bought.
Her life becomes defined by windows, doors, blind spots, and vanishing points as paranoia takes hold. A dramatic turn of events forces her move to London, where she shaves her head into a buzz cut to feel unrecognisable, unattractive, almost erased. Donning a mask once used to play “The English Tiger Lady” in Muriel Spark’s The Public Image, she embraces a slippery identity – neither male nor female, but animal, primal, alien.
Her best life in Hackney is soon silenced by another trauma, a contagion that haunts her and tempts her toward disappearance, down black holes and rabbit holes. Death hovers as a shimmering presence. Antidepressants follow, making her brain buzz, and she is admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where group therapy leaves her crying not only for herself but for everyone else.
It proves no haven. Instead, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the ward delivers fresh trauma. Recovery eventually comes through a proper diagnosis, appropriate treatment, and the redemptive power of art. Protection, she finds, lies in literature – from nonsense poems to the words of Emily Dickinson and Franz Kafka.
The story unfolds as a collage of visions, memories, and images drifting between past and present. Drawing on her experience as a lecturer, visual artist, and singer, Lyons crafts a stand-up tragedy: a mix of talk, performance art, memoir, and survival anthem. Dark humour threads through the piece, and her obsession with perception – with seeing and being seen, with witnessing rather than merely spectating – holds the narrative together.
Yet despite aiming for a conversational tone, she never feels fully engaged in her own story. The delivery is halting and a little performative, and the execution would benefit from greater energy.
Buzz ultimately finds its strength in the fragile power of testimony, the reminder that we are, indeed, more than our tragedies and that survival is an art form in itself.
Show Times: 31 July - 24 (not 11, 18) August 2025 at 3.30pm
Tickets: £9 to £13 (£12) and £14 (£13).
Suitability: 14+ (Note – The show contains references to suicide and sexually explicit material).