The Shape of Things Undone Audio monologue @ Brighton Fringe

There are moments in performance when the world outside ceases to exist, when whatever patch of pavement you happen to be standing on, whatever kitchen you are drifting through, becomes unexpectedly, the only room that matters. Lita Doolan's The Shape of Things Undone does exactly that. I listened walking along the seafront, wind in my ears, and within minutes I had forgotten the sea entirely.

This 33-minute audio monologue is, on the surface, deceptively modest: one woman, one voice, one night shift. Christine; performed with extraordinary emotional intelligence by Julie Broadbent, is clearing a room at a care home being decommissioned. What unfolds is quiet, an accumulating weight of her narration, Doolan constructs a profound inquiry into what medicine risks discarding in its headlong rush toward the quantifiable: the mug someone always reaches for first, the particular way a person likes to be addressed, the knowledge, held only in a carer's body, of how someone is.

What moved me most was the humanity Doolan locates in the act of witnessing. "My job wasn't to correct him," Christine reflects of her father. "It was to sit there like a paperweight and go, I see you, I'm here. You're still a person, even if you mislaid my name." For those of us who have loved someone whose memory has become a shifting thing, this lands with precision. For those of us in communities that have historically been erased, misnamed, or simply not seen it resonates somewhere even deeper.

Broadbent's performance is a sustained act of restraint and revelation. She inhabits Christine's wry, exhausted, tenderly observational consciousness with such specificity that the character feels present, breathing in the same moment you are. The play is, as Doolan intended, site-responsive: you bring your own geography to it, your own light, your own associations. I found myself thinking about care in its broadest sense, who gives it, who receives it, who society decides is worth the resources, who gets classified as "high risk" and handed a piece of paper that makes their hands shake.

There is nothing flashy here. No spectacle, no score demanding emotional cues. What there is instead is rigorous, beautiful writing operating at the intersection of the intimate and the systemic, asking, as Doolan herself puts it, "what progress needs to remember." Released during Dementia Action Week, the timing is pointed without being didactic. The play does not lecture. It trusts you.

Download it. Listen to it wherever you are. Let it make wherever you are feel important.

Available free at brightonfringe.org

The Shape of Things Undone Audio monologue | Brighton Fringe 2026 | Free on demand until 31 May