A woman walks to her apartment, jangles her keys, opens and closes a door. She repeats this several times, the recorded sound looping round and round, creating an almost cacophonous effect. Welcome to The Foley Explosion, a show probably unlike anything you have seen before. One of the great joys of the Offbeat Festival is the platform it gives to more experimental productions. On the surface, this is part a spy thriller, part an exploration of modern Russia. Yet in execution it expands from this, turning into a fascinating audio-visual experience.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a Foley sound effect is one recorded in a film's post-production. It is a recreation of all the sounds in a film, both on-screen and off-screen, to create a total audio experience. It gives a film's audio a smack of reality, but is entirely artificial, created in a studio.

This piece is dense, sprawling, fascinating. It has several touchpoints on modern Russia, with cameos from the likes of Edward Snowden and Alexander Litvinenko. But nestled amongst the references to geopolitical events and surreal encounters with historical figures is the story of one girl's journey from the Midlands to Russia. This leads our narrator, who has ambitions of a career in the secret services, through university and onto a brief career in journalism. There are lovely notes of humanity to this story, and I wish this had been the focus throughout The Foley Explosion. If the production falls down at times, it is that there is too much to explore here, and it needs a more constant narrative throughline to hang all of its ideas on.

Where The Foley Explosion truly impresses is in the central performance from Julie Rose Bower, who makes an engaging storyteller. We watch as she records and constructs the play's sound effects live, looping them together. She is surrounded by a circle of props and audio equipment. It is captivating to watch Julie take several children's toys and use the sounds of their parts moving to audibly construct an ornate clock (given to Catherine the Great by one of her lovers). There is a constant joy watching this performer go through the process of constructing her craft.

The Foley Explosion is a genuinely interesting piece of theatre that only frustrates in the true greatness you can see in it. Yet on a technical level it is astounding and marks Julie Rose Bower as a talent worth keeping an eye on.