Split Ends

Claudia is consumed by her split ends until she fell in love with a Vacuum, an actual Vacuum, who happened to be the hairiest thing she’d ever fallen in love with. A thing that made her want to pluck her arm hairs, wax her legs and cut her hair.

The Vacuum would shed his hairs, leave, disappear, reappear, shed, tell her he loved her, tell her he lied, leave, shed, appear, shed, malt, love, lie, cheat, shed, shed while she waited for him to pull the plug on what they had because she couldn’t.

The show explores this Australian actor’s experiences with OCD, control and the abuse of power disguised as love. The story follows Claudia, who has an obsessive compulsion of cutting her own hair, and how she falls in love with a Vacuum, a relationship that progressively evolves into one that is psychologically abusive and seemingly inescapable.

Using puppetry, multi-media and physical theatre, this tragi-comedy asks us to question what forces are within our control and the ones that control us. New to the UK theatre scene from Australia, Claudia’s previous one-woman show was reviewed by Theatre Travels, “Shnier graced the stage to deliver an astonishing performance…I felt like I should have looked away from her spectacularised destruction, but I couldn’t.”

As a recent graduate from RADA and as a multi-disciplined performer, she has written, directed, composed and designed the sound as well as edited other multi-media elements for this show.

In an exploration of control, love and the addiction to people who hurt us, ‘Split Ends’ uses a combination of stand-up comedy, puppetry and multi-media to attempt to understand when we are meticulously in control or incredibly out of it.