When you go to see COMA you will not actually be “seeing” much of anything, as the show is an entirely auditory experience had in complete darkness.

You’re ushered into the ‘COMA’ emblazoned shipping container to choose a bunk bed and affix your 360-degree audio headphones as the lights fade to black, and from there? Well, the doctor is ready to see you now.

Those individuals who tend towards high-strung may be wary of a show as potentially claustrophobic as this, and to you I say that the airflow is plentiful and that the dark is a lot less scary if you close your eyes and pretend you’re asleep, or in a coma if you prefer. The beauty of a pitch black room is that it can be as large or as small as you want it to be in your imagination. 

From there commences what is loosely a story. Our frenetic narrator is overwhelming in the way that someone who jumps from topic to topic and scarcely leaves you time to process what you just heard is overwhelming. To its credit, COMA really is dreamlike in that no one has ever had a dream that started at point A and ended at point B. Indeed, a cacophonous sequence near the end gave me that sensation of falling endlessly through a void while you’re half asleep. Rarely have I found a solely auditory experience so evocative. 

Despite the frightening set-up, COMA is not horror. The narrator, while manic at times, affects a honeyed-tone that is more likely to send you off to sleep than to scare. However, Type A’s tread lightly. Though there is little menace in COMA narratively or spatially, the aspect perhaps most terrifying is the need to relinquish control and simply trust. This is the central tension of COMA, as we’re all role playing as those unable to speak or move, merely capable of listening. Being cognisant of but unable to affect change to the circumstances in which we find ourselves is the terror here. 

Centrally located in The Woodside Pleasure Garden, COMA is hard to miss. The quick run time (30 minutes) and easy access makes it a great show to see if you’re looking to see something short, sweet and bizarre.