My place on HoardingUK’s Charity Board is to occasionally contribute and chip in with my personal experience of hoarding. Our voices need to be heard! T he hour long play deftly conveys how hoarding and the shame of the condition gets in the way of personal relationships and those that we love, often keeping them at bay. She sought help from a psychotherapist, who made her realise that, while there had been no single trauma causing what was by now fully-blown OCD, shopping had become Horton’s coping mechanism - an instant way, when her ex-boyfriend was abusive, or when a friend died suddenly, “to generate a nice feeling for myself… it just got out of hand.”

The degree to which this is a problem comes into focus in this solo show by playwright Laura Horton when Sophie starts dating Jo, the first time she has had the courage to go out with a woman after years of relationships with men. She notes with horror that Jo’s place contains little more than three pairs of shoes and an old school tie, a level of minimalism she fears will tear them apart.

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Horton has a string of awards for her work, and Breathless is set to be another testament to her skill. I want to wish Laura and the entire Production Team a successful Festival run. My hope is it begins a conversation and opens up a much greater awareness into the often-complex mental health condition of hoarding, often with other comorbidities, just to complicate the situation.

I was in my mid-30s when I started to confront how much I had. I was living in Plymouth and, even after selling 400 items at a clothing sale, still had a huge van stuffed to the brim. I remember a woman coming to the sale telling me to be careful, she was a psychologist and said I may feel the same rush selling as I do buying and have quite a drop afterwards. It was mostly freeing, letting things go, but I had a few wobbles, moments I wanted to stop time, take the clothes from people’s hands without having to converse about how I’d changed my mind. An articulate and passionate call for understanding, that balances psychological depth and kindness” After Edinburgh it’s returning to two theatres in Laura’s native South West – playing at the Brewhouse Taunton on Saturday 1st October, and at Exeter’s Phoenix on Sunday 2nd October. Living with a mental health issue is not something that is easily and neatly resolved, it’s a constant process of work and self-acceptance. This show reflects this through its openness and generosity. You can’t move simply between things. My flat is stuffed with possessions and the recollections I attach to them.The female monologue is a well-established contemporary theatre form, but often the content is predictable and sometimes clichéd. No such doubts come to mind with Laura Horton’s latest play, Breathless, a semi-autobiographical 70-minute account of hoarding clothes. Horton describes herself as having been “on the knife-edge” of compulsive collecting, in denial for a long time because of media portrayals of the condition are so extreme. Her one-woman show explores an original subject with an impressively tight control over language and storytelling. And it has its funny moments too.