EDINBURGH 2022: BREATHLESS Guest Blog

Guest Blog - Laura Horton, in association with Theatre Royal Plymouth, brings brazen new play 'Breathless' to the Fringe

Laura discusses the effects of clothes hoarding on her life.

Plymouth Laureate of Words Laura Horton blogs for Broadway World about exposing her real-life addiction on the stage, the stigma around it and translating her issues into a funny, honest yet dark performance piece.

In 2021 I was approached by Theatre Royal Plymouth to research, develop and present a triptych of twenty-minute plays. I had few ideas about the third piece other than I knew I wanted it to be a monologue. As time was short, I ended up penning a very personal piece about a woman moving back to Devon and struggling to navigate dating as a hoarder. The reaction to it was really powerful; I had many people approach me to say they thought they might hoard or knew people who did. What was clear to me was that I needed to develop the piece. I've written one other play about hoarding, an absurdist ensemble piece, but when I wrote it, I didn't understand my brain like I do now. I hadn't made the breakthroughs. That first is a play I'd love to develop eventually, but this play, Breathless, is definitely the right piece to begin my creative exploration about hoarding.

I can't pinpoint the moment it all started but clothes for me have always been a way of escape, a chance to imagine other versions of my life, it always felt like the more clothes I bought the more options I was buying for myself. It wasn't until I had to move house a few years ago that I realised the extent of my problem. I had thousands of things all suction-packed up. I didn't think of myself as a hoarder because media portrayals were so extreme, mostly older people living in severe scenarios. I knew I was on a knife-edge though, that I could teeter either way. Why are we only seeing the extremity of mental health disorders and addictions? I decided to just start talking about it online, I made time to write, not to shop. I started slowly but surely sifting things out of my life. People contacted me to say what I was saying resonated. It would seem many people, if not hoarders, had more things than they needed. That for me was the turning point and it's what I explore a lot in my work.

I think the only way to de-stigmatise mental health and addiction is to talk about the different stages and experiences of it. The more I speak and write about my hoarding, the more I can highlight the sliding scale of the problem; it all starts somewhere. Translating my experience to the stage has been a fascinating process. I didn't want to visualise hoarding, so I worked with Theatre Royal Plymouth and director Stephanie Kempson to present a simple set. We were keen to use sound to elevate the subject matter and Verity Standen's acapella compositions really seemed to get inside the human experience, really chiming with the moments of anxiety and joy in the play.

As a PR, audiences have always been forefront of my mind, making Breathless I really wanted to develop projects alongside the play to create space for further discussions about hoarding and sustainability. I'm currently developing a hoarding podcast called Hidden by Things that I'll launch at the beginning of the Fringe, speaking to people who identify or understand the subject matter, making people, not their things, the centre of the conversation.

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Photo credit: Dom Moore