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All Consuming

nytheatre.com review by Scott Mendelsohn
August 15, 2005

In 45 minutes onstage, Clare Nicholls conjures all the raw sparks of an electrical storm. The familiar story of addiction, bottoming out, and recovery is conducted like lightening through Nicholls’s angular limbs and amazingly versatile rock singer’s voice, causing her to flash from one character to another, each illuminated by the strobe-like clarity of her acting. In All Consuming, she tells the story of her own struggle with alcohol and bulimia with a delightful recklessness, and makes it something bracing and inspiring.The text Nicholls has written for herself is roughhewn—it does not have the polish of a fine dramatist.. Yet it's made to sound utterly compelling through Nicholls’s fine ear for language and comedy. She opens her performance with an astonishing rhymed list of drinks that made me long to hear her play one of Shakespeare’s clowns. The words and images fly by, yet each lands in our ear and heart crisply. Moreover, she plays 19 characters, most of whom have distinct accents from various parts of the British Isles, Croatia, and Sydney, Australia. And the self-written rock songs that are sprinkled through the piece are moving, rich, and sung with real depth. And when she reaches her alcoholic, bulimic bottom, she collapses, holding still for only a brief few seconds, but with an eloquence that echoes after the show is over.Above all, Nicholls makes the telling of her story seem vibrantly, achingly necessary. Her performance is full of constant invention, generously offered up to the audience. I never felt asked to sympathize with Nicholls’s history at all; rather she carves her way through the piece, skewering and deflating any sentimentality or easy answers with sharp wit, clarity, and a healthy dose of compassion, even for the frailty, pettiness, and most self-destructive elements of her own life. When the show is over, she leaves behind the charge of survival. I deeply hope this passion and detail extend beyond this one piece—I would enjoy seeing her continue to tell her story, and I believe she could breathe genuine life into the work of a first class playwright.