Sunrise is a one-woman show from writer, performer and illustrator Jessie Cave, charting the aftermath of her breakup with fellow comedian and father of her two young children, Alfie Brown. It feels like something more than stand up, more than a theatre show. It’s confessional, brutally honest and entirely candid. Sex is an almost constant theme, but it’s far from sexy. More than anything else, it’s very funny.

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Two large pillows feature cross-stitched male faces; they play the parts of Brown and an unnamed subsequent boyfriend who is dated and dumped in the duration of the play. When they each appear in anecdotes, Cave holds the respective pillow in front of her face and speaks the lines of dialogue through them. The props are simple, as is the performance device, but there is so much charm in their simplicity. The staging takes a similar feel; delightfully unpolished and thoroughly domestic. Much of the performance takes place from within a three sided structure comprised of wooden baby gates, adorned with blankets, pom-poms and toddlers toys. Cave explains that it resembles the “cage” that surrounds the bed in which she sleeps with her children. A black backdrop, made by her mother, is decorated with embroidered motifs of the sun, childlike in their design and composition and framed by fairy lights. There is a familial feel to every visual element; I never once forget that Cave is a parent to two young children, even when she’s telling stories of an eye infection caused by her boyfriends bad aim, or a reluctant trip to an STI clinic. She touches frequently on themes of conflicting emotion over leaving them - first for an evening date, then to spend a weekend at a Harry Potter convention in Paris - and I realise that I have rarely heard someone talk so brazenly about a topic so domestic, so traditionally maternal.

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Cave herself looks like an extension of the set, dressed in layers of contrasting colours and patterns. I feel like I’m watching a performance without the performance, like she’s just popped into the theatre for a chat that she happens to have rehearsed. Five minutes in, Cave laughs out loud at one of her lines, and falls to her knees, ducking behind a blanket to compose herself. “Oh no, it’s too early in the show for this” she giggles. It is beyond endearing. The audience laughs, and I realise that I have been holding my breath; something about her being alone on stage has made me nervous for her. Her breaking character somehow puts me at ease. This happens twice more in the space of a few minutes; Cave seems to laugh in anticipation of lines that she knows are coming next. Each time, we all giggle until she composes herself. Some lines seem to make her teary. We don’t laugh at that. I feel like her unguarded emotions are driving the development of a level of camaraderie amongst the audience that I have never before experienced in a theatre. This soon proves to be important; Cave pats her pocket and realises that she has left her phone - a necessary prop for the next scene - in her dressing room. She runs off stage, apologising profusely, and returns flustered and unsettled. She tries to get back into it, but quickly gives up, looking up at the tech team behind us. “I don’t think I can do this,” she tells them. She looks upset, vulnerable, and I realise that I have never before experienced this in a theatre either. “I can’t do this, I’m sorry.” The audience misses a beat, but only for a second; we’ve been laughing with her for ten minutes now. The awkwardness disappeared the first time it happened. We’re friends. People start to cheer, to clap, to shout out encouragingly. Cave doesn’t look convinced. The pitch intensifies, the vigour increases, and soon we have persuaded her to continue.

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Later, after we have all gone home, Cave takes to Instagram to detail the extent of her disappointment. People are quick to reassure her, and I realise just how cathartic the evening has been. It felt like a rare treat, a small opportunity to catch something that unashamedly, and almost unconsciously, sits outside the lines of the expected. Failure, in its rawest, most immediate and most public form, feels like something that we are rarely given an insight - much less a front row seat - into. To see it unfurl in real life, in real time, felt rare; reassuring, intimate and privileged. Cave might have felt that the performance was a failure, but it felt to me like a triumph. It was beautiful and tender and delicate, not despite the “mini onstage breakdown and public existential crisis”, but because of it.