After a long day debating "what is live literature?" and an arse made numb by hard seats, I must admit that by 4pm I was not relishing "a collaboration between poets, a director, a choreographer and composer". A show that claimed, "to stretch the form" and be "ever evolving" was less welcome than a cup of strong tea.

It is to the credit of the Contact Theatre team that by 5pm my cup of tea was stone cold. I was mesmerised and so was the rest of the audience. This was live literature that was well written, well edited, well rehearsed and where the music content actually had some relevance to the writing. Blimey, there was also humour!

Ben Mellor, Martin Stannage and Samira Arhin-Acquaah had individually explored the theme of hearing voices. The angles were diverse. Ben had looked at the historical background, Samira had explored other people's attitudes towards her identity, and Martin had created a narrative about a man who imagines he can see a yeti in the streets of Manchester. The skill of this show was to meld these stories into a fusion of poetry and soundscapes, using the territory of the nightmare world of urban paranoia.

Their world was marked by three chalked out spaces on the floor and the performers moved through these spaces creating imagined walls, doors and voids. The sound and lighting suggested the 'voices' that we are bombarded by in modern life; computer games, traffic, television. Sometimes the characters showed tenderness towards each other but mostly they were isolated in their own fictions.

The power of this show was that we cared about these characters. Ben's plea for understanding. Samira's challenge to our preconceptions. (Yes, I did think she was a bloke) and Martin's depiction of the hinterland of madness. And what is madness anyway in a mad world?

I loved it. I loved the questions it raised and the way it dealt with them. Bang on and physical. The characters balanced around each other with the skill of dancers. It was a visual and aural treat. Congratulations to Shabina Aslam, Leo Kay and the rest of the production team. If this is live literature I want more of it.

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