Exploring her mother's tragic descent into suicide, performer Kristin Fredricksson's haunting new show is a scrappy photo album of inventively staged recollections. Fredricksson has stored fragments of her childhood in a theatrical toybox that jumbles playful experimentation with a fine thread of elegy.
Together with Georgina Roberts and the dependably weird Seiriol Davies, Fredricksson re-enacts footage of her and her sisters at play, with video projections drifting over their bodies and through an intricate Wendy House of spectral gauzes.
Her conspiring siblings are ingeniously presented as conniving cat puppets, and her mentally ill grandmother an effigy of twisted wire emerging from a handbag. Fredricksson's mother is a splintered spectre; part stubborn bull that snorts and charges blindly, part Cleopatra waltzing with the asp.
Tonally, Fredricksson's motley 8mm approach feels rather familiar. The presence of Davies naturally raises comparisons with Caroline Horton's similarly pitched recent?Edinburgh?Fringe smash 'Mess', but there is enough that is heartfelt in the writing and startling in the realisation to give 'Cooking Ghosts' a power of its own.