Harrogate Theatre/Touring

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IF YOU’VE ever broken up with someone via text message or wished you could be alone for more than 10 minutes then you’re the target audience for I Wish I Was Lonely.

The latest participatory show from Edinburgh fringe-first winners Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe, it explores what it means to hand over power to the new gods in our pockets. 

Penicillin discoverer Alexander Fleming, they surmise, might have called his colleagues and asked them to dispose of petri dishes he’d left on the windowsill. Conversely, suicidal people have been talked down from tall buildings using mobiles.

Such poetically ambivalent philosophising is interspersed with layered and playfully participatory exercises. 

After texting and leaving a voice message to anonymous audience members, handsets are discarded in a chalk circle where they lie, blinking and accusatory.

Having being instructed to leave them turned on, those singled out look at their mobiles anxiously and hope they won’t ring while they participate in a Chinese whispers-type game in which a string of over-sharing text messages create an overwhelming cacophony. 

This simple idea captures the vast volume of noise people contend with every day. But it’s rendered even more powerful when Thorpe and Walker communicate text messages in robotic voices from opposite sides of the space, with the inanities and lack of real understanding painful to hear.

Despite such moments of tension the production is never quite as poetic — or clever — as it purports to be. The show’s hash-tag sits uncomfortably with its call for more real communication, while the fact that only one audience member receives a message during its duration suggests that maybe it is still possible for silence to be enjoyed.

Tours until June 20, details: www.hannahjanewalker.co.uk.