The extraordinary that lurks behind the facade of the ordinary and the profound that can be extracted from the seemingly banal is the province of Bobby Baker. Over the past decade she has produced a body of work that concentrates on the domestic and the small things in life that turn out to be vitally important.
From the Kitchen Show, which had Baker inviting us into her home, through How to Shop, which discovered the spiritual aspects of a trip to the supermarket, Baker has placed the everyday lives of women centre stage. In the current piece, showing as part of the London international festival of theatre, she opens a Pandora's box stuffed with cornflakes, mustard, matches and other staples, and uses them to make a map that explores the contours of catastrophe in her life.
Baker's world is not a heroic one. It is a daffy place of perms that go wrong, childhood pranks that get you into trouble, drunken disasters and allergic reactions to washing powder. Even real tragedy is low-key: her father's drowning is wrapped in a sausage sandwich, the pungent taste of mustard lingering with death on the tongue.
Box Story cuts straight to the heart of the things central to women's lives - our invisible domestic lives, children, the endless juggling and our impossible desire to make everything all right. In one sequence, Baker describes a disastrous shopping trip to Ikea that culminates in a car accident and leaves her sobbing on the kerb: "It's all my fault." I doubt that I was the only woman in the audience who had to suppress the urge to shout out: "No, actually it's mine."
It is all a matter of perspective, made sharper here by the way Baker's chaotic life is played out in the still, quiet grandeur of St Luke's Church in Holloway, north London, and is accompanied by choral interventions specially composed by Jocelyn Pook. These begin as mild admonitions of the wayward young Bobby and develop into graceful hymns of passion for Bryant and May matches and Coleman's mustard. Like Baker's work itself they are a mixture of the absurd and the sacred, the inconsequential and the searing, a glorious celebration of the fact that small is beautiful and meaningful. If God happened to be looking down, Box Story couldn't fail to bring a smile to his lips.
Until June 30. Box office: 020-7863 8017.
