Never Get to Heaven in an Empty Shell. The Glitch.

Claudia Fielding’s thoughtful and cleverly penned urban ghost story, Never Get to Heaven in an Empty Shell, is mainly set in Angel tube station. The piece invites a site-specific production, but at The Glitch, we get train tracks covered with discarded clothes sweeping diagonally across the performance space. The station sign, which seems to be mostly made from surplus underwear, is rather more blood-crimson than one associates with the London Underground.  Director Anna Rastelli opens the piece with a soundscape of urgent, thudding, repetitive drumbeats.  The mise-en-scène is eerie, atmospheric, and full of foreboding, fit for a monologue that shifts restlessly between supernatural angst and dry, dark comedy.

Claud (Fielding performs as well as writes) spends her life surrounded by family, colleagues (they “feel like family, in the sense I hate them,” she tells us), and strangers on the Tube, yet remains profoundly lonely and disconnected. Grieving the loss of a father, stuck in a dead-end job, she struggles to feel much about anything, or find reasons for living beyond “the two times a year when McDonald’s monopoly comes around”.  She drinks too much, dislikes children, obsesses about suicide, and wonders if this is her year to try becoming a lesbian. Fielding’s characterisation is deftly revealing of her protagonist’s intense inner turmoil, and the writer has a sharp eye for pithy comic asides.

Dodging an intrusive man who keeps insisting “you’ve left something behind” and a group of tourists on the tube platform, Claud nearly falls. She is pulled back from danger by an ethereal elderly woman called Ruth, who recognises the charity shop jumper Claud wears. It is one of her cast-offs, and Ruth, now a ghost, wants it back. Without the jumper and stuck in purgatory (a familiar feeling on the escalators at Angel station), Ruth cannot ascend to a realm that promises to be rather more heavenly than Islington High Street.

Fielding’s narrative follows Claud’s life in the weeks and months leading up to the encounter and the emotional reckoning she must undergo to relinquish the jumper (a metaphor, one presumes, for her unresolved grief). Events on route to potential redemption include a family wedding (“never the bridesmaid, always the broom”, Claud complains), outings with siblings, and laundry with an obsessive-compulsive boyfriend.

Never Get to Heaven in an Empty Shell delivers a clever, though not entirely unpredictable, twist to the tale. Full of light and shade, this is a ghost story that ends up more tragic than terrifying. Quality writing hints at more and better things to come from Fielding.

Writer:   Claudia Fielding

Director:    Anna Rastelli