Review by Simon Jenner, July 26 2025
An engaging New Hampshire woman has invited us all on a mass dating event, with her. Is she oversharing? Dating Apps are dead to her. Demisexual, queer, OCD and needing to make intense emotional contact before anything sizzles, she hopes we won’t mind our filling these Trauma Bingo cards outlining our worst fears. It’s a prerequisite to intimacy. To help, she offers wine; even a one-to-one. Tana Sirois’ UnTethered opens at SweetVenues’ Yellow Book directed by Polina Ionina till July 26th. This follows performances in Istanbul, New York, and a UK/London premiere at Camden People’s Theatre in March; and again in May. It’s about to land in Edinburgh from August 1-16th.
Tana Sirois, Yellow Book Theatre. Photo Credit Peter Williams
UnTethered is unique, bordering intricacy with calculated messiness. Let’s unpack that. It’s a probing work about OCD and the calculus of obsession: which shows a superficial ritual structure that breeds chaos beneath. Structurally the show’s like that too. Most, it’s boundary-pushing as to where in the fourth wall the pain ends, and asks: where’s yours?
Sirois expresses borderline neurodivergent fears where nearly all of us border those anxieties with neurosis (who isn’t divergent somewhere?); but addresses a specific quasi-autobiographical melt. Sirois, a super-alert actor blessed with a fine voice and clearly able to sing, is a great mover too. Clips show her leaping up a rope at one large venue: smaller ones can’t accommodate everything. Through a gallimaufry of dance routines she sheds her childhood, primal fears from four years old. Despite this sharing Sirois shrewdly gives nothing away but her fears.
Lighting handled by Skyler Reid (also stage manager) is crisp, micro-synched as the sound. Sirois, a consummate performer perpetually shifts in and out of presentation, recall, re-enactment and dance, and… confronted with a baggy monster made of plastic bags (the director lurking in a complete black onesie); the detritus of fears, washed and encrusted in Sirois’ psyche. Later she fights and kick-boxes it. Near the end Sirois picks up a guitar she was earlier about to smash over her tormenter’s head. And sings.
Sirois deploys a moment of puppetry; it could have been extended. A red-green frogish flibbertyigibbet with a cute (pre-recorded) advertising voice you hear on YouTube ads oozes creepy charm. “Don’t connect with people. They’ll disappoint you. And give you Chlamydia.” This unnerving steroid of capitalism metastazes fears, micro-moments of anxiety; generated by the hyper-attentive landscape we live in.
Yet there’s humour and poetry. Rapunzel can’t escape from the tower till she’s certain she’s locked the tower door. There’s moments where language evokes the imagery hinted here: “Love is a breaking apart…” or later: “where time moves slow enough for me to realize that I’m deeply in love with the wrinkles of confusion that appear on your forehead each time you wake.” At another venue there was a more deeply-inlaid light moment: words could breathe air from another planet. Some of that is caught here in the most moving seconds of the show. Beyond the frenetic brilliance, Sirois’ use of language is where her heart touches ours, and might point her ahead.
Elsewhere too the images projected at the back of the relatively deep space are intended to be far more prominent (as you can see on the website). A Wheel of Mayhem, picked out in midnight blue and white writing, is vanishingly small but illustrates a feeding cycle of compulsion=distress and so on. It’s designed too to play on the actor’s face (again, website). It doesn’t here. Such visual effects are inevitably lost in small venues like the Yellow Book, though more visible at places like Camden (an excellent and very perceptive review from my colleague Ben Aarons https://fringereview.co.uk/review/fringereview-uk/2025/untethered/ outlines his experience).
The invitation is taken up, audience member do quiz or share with Sirois, who however asks an outrageous question; then understandably self-interrupts, offering a singular prize. This, the show’s defining switchback motif, means compulsions and OCD moments are built into the fractured arc of storytelling. We never do get an autobiography, understandably; nor yet do we get those moments of sharing promised by our filling in the Trauma Bingo. This apparently is a local decision, made out of timing issues, an understandable anxiety about just how many borderlines can be crossed. Fearless with herself, Sirois need have no fears where permission can be granted; fulfilling the contract of filling in personal details, discharged in the full boundary-breaking of the unique model Sirois creates.
In a world where any difference is labelled neurodiverse (better than its predecessors) it’s not just the stigmatising of all kinds of OCD, but the refusal to look at any of these anxieties and ask where they come from. Scapegoating is a convenient discharge of poisons societal norms have injected. More precisely those very ad-voices of late capitalist realism buzzing round Sirois’ ears. Yet even leaving those aside, the connotation between the very ads designed to enforce anxiety, and sneers at those who exhibit those traits this world has designer-tailored for all of us, abides our question.
Sirois burns through the mist of manners and gyrates, slams and slaps answers. She’s almost too good at this; some physical routines are extended. If restricted to an hour, Sirois might pare these slightly to let words, or audience interaction breathe back in, where they’ve evidently been edited for a shorter show.
Tana Sirois, Yellow Book Theatre. Photo Credit Peter Williams
UnTethered has developed since Ben Aarons saw it in March. Technically though it’s had to take half a step back, though the Yellow Book space has depth, and its personnel are hugely supportive. Edinburgh’s spaces will challenge differently. It’s exciting work all right, and I agree with Ben Aarons that developed to its full unnerving – and interactive – potential, UnTethered could be outstanding and groundbreaking. What Tara Sirois does next could, and should, unnerve everyone; including herself.