I’m not Pale, I’m Dead @ Assembly Hall

One-woman show I’m not Pale, I’m Dead is a simple piece that unfolds from a single premise: what would you tell an Edinburgh Fringe audience if, after your death, you briefly became visible and audible?

The Roof The House’s Lydia Nicholson chooses to remind her listeners of those things that the living often forget the importance of. Like touching a loved one, or feeling their sleepy breath on the back of your neck.

Nicholson inspires a benevolence in her audience that makes them go along with her fiction of being immaterial – "You couldn’t feel my hand at all, could you?" – and her at times rather obvious guidance. "Spend less time on Facebook" is hardly the kind of hard-hitting, potentially unwelcome advice you expect from an entity who is a world removed from yours. Her sassy stories about picking up guys are slightly too self-conscious and tasteful to be properly hilarious, but it’s nice to know that death comes with a sense of proportion in these things. A snog is a snog even if you don’t know the name of the tongue’s owner.

All that’s truly innovative about I’m not Pale, I’m Dead is its premise. But perhaps it’s only suitable that the deep truths we all need to be reminded of are always there, staring us right in the face. We just don’t see them.