Clothes To Fall Apart In, a one-man show from The Off-Off-Off Broadway Company, positions the audience as mourners at A Very Sad Woman’s wake. Unfortunately, it was a diminutive number that entered the faux funeral on this occasion, adding comedy weight to the performer’s observation, as the sister of the deceased, that she hadn’t realised her sibling was “so popular”.

South African performance artist Jaacq Hugo, played the dead woman (on film) as well as her brother and sister who were eulogising at the wake.

A competent and believable actor, his monologues offered a mix of black humour and suppressed sentimentality. At first there appeared to be no love lost between the family members as they recounted tales of promiscuity, clothes-obsession and shoe fetishes, but a tenderness eventually seeped through the cracks of criticism.

While Hugo nipped backstage to change costume, a projected screen of filmed interludes gave further insight into the life of the passed character. There were two films, both too long and adding very little to the spoken words. The low-fi home movie style forced open a whole box of questions such as why would anyone be filming this? And why would someone play a film of their sister with her naked boyfriend at their funeral?

The idea was a good one, but the execution fell a little short. Any engagement achieved by the physical presence of an actor was dismantled immediately by the protracted films. Allusions to being part of something intimate, sadly, remained just that.