ONE of the UK’s leading performance storytellers blends innovative sound technology with poignant, funny and uplifting narrative about art, love and letting go at New Milton’s Forest Arts Centre on October 5.

Debs Newbold, highly celebrated performer and Shakespeare’s Globe storyteller, delivers a moving and funny new one-woman show about loving someone who isn’t dead but who isn’t living either.

With just her voice, a mic, a loop pedal, Debs creates a cinematic performance, using simple sounds to create textured soundscapes that transport the audience into the mind of a coma patient, where he lives in his own world inside Vincent van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles, and the real world inhabited by the daughter he left behind.

Deep in a coma the man hides out in the blue bedroom of Vincent van Gogh whilst his teenage daughter struggles to understand her part in the accident that put him there. Paintings, pigeon racing and a family about to implode meet in this vital, gripping story.

Describing Lost in Blue, Debs Newbold said, “This show started off as a niggling thought about the voice. I'd just lost my Nan, who had an extraordinary voice. I knew I had a recording of her but it was ages before I could bring myself to listen to it. Hearing the recorded voice of a loved one who has died is as near to an encounter with a ghost as I can imagine and I began to get ideas about a person who manages to be both absent and present at the same time. That's where the image of a man in a coma came from. I saw him and I saw his daughter, like a painting. He lying on a bed, she looking out of a window, waiting. Another woman too, unable to speak. And that's where it began.”

Debs Newbold's storytelling brings together the poetic and the irreverent, the epic and the everyday. She is one of the UK's fastest rising performance storytellers, regularly playing venues such as the Royal Opera House, the British Library, the Southbank Centre, the RSC and Shakespeare's Globe as well as many prestigious festivals and friendly intimate spaces in both the UK and abroad. Lost in Blue is Directed by John Wright and Produced by Nimble Fish.

Tickets from forest-arts.co.uk or 01425 612393.