In PurSUEt – VAULT Festival, London

Writer: Eleanor Higgins

Director: Tom Knight

After waking up underneath a Christmas tree with a black eye and last night’s party outfit on, Eleanor Higgins’ “Woman” makes a mad dash for her therapy session. Not that she needs it, she says. When told that denial is a river in Egypt, she scoffs. She’s not living in denial, she’s living in da moment. She just needs the love of her life to become her girlfriend, and all will be well.

There’s just one problem. The object of her affection is Sue Perkins, the former Great British Bake Off host, comedian, panel show host and generally likeable person – the kind of lesbian any girl would love to take home to meet her parents. Sue, of course, has no reason to believe that Woman exists. And so, the stalking begins.

Higgins’s choice of Perkins to be the subject of this fictional stalking is a canny move by the writer. We can empathise with the need to have someone so warm and approachable in our personal orbit: who wouldn’t want Sue to be, if not a girlfriend, then at least a friend?

And that affection for Woman’s target also makes the character Higgins plays, as clearly all the more desperate and adrift in her own self-delusion, the obvious antihero in her own story. Her attempts to blag entry to backstage VIP areas, convinced that once Sue meets her they’ll instantly become a couple, are cringingly embarrassing: not least because Woman is heavily inebriated each time, and seems to be the only one unaware of the state she is in.

And that is the real story that unfolds in Higgins’s piece. Woman’s spiralling into the depths of alcoholism moves from something only hinted at to a full-on crisis. And so In PurSUEt becomes less about stalking a celebrity crush, and more about the emptiness which that crush has been hiding: a hole that cannot be filled until its existence is acknowledged.

Higgins’s portrayal of Woman’s lowest moments, presented in a cacophonous sequence of sound and light, is shocking and heartbreaking. And it is in that section, and its aftermath, that the beauty of her writing finally bears fruit. In PurSUEt is a treatise on the need for self-care: no amount of unreciprocated love for a celebrity can compensate for a lack of love for ourselves.

Continues until 5 March 2023