THIS is an artistic statement from Leeds multi-media company A Quiet Word. "While we do use text, along with film and music, the word is only part of the material we use to tell a story. Hence the name of the company: the Word is there, but it's Quiet."

A quiet word in your ear, if I may: these two complementary pieces of film and live performance are suffused with words; words battering away at your head like a woodpecker on a tree; words delivered in enervated monotone by actress/artistic director Alison Andrews, as if we are in a therapy session.

In The Studio, much of the room is taken up with the screen and its gauze front, behind which Andrews is the sole live performer, integrating with sound, imagery and actors on screen.

This is a narrow performance strip, and her performance style is similarly narrow, minimalist to the max, lifting a glass here, lifting an eyebrow there.

Burnt Offerings & Bad Habits is a conversation piece, fought out against the not-so-quiet elements on a long walk over a windy heath.

It could be a conversation between a director and an actress, perhaps a father and daughter, maybe King Lear and Cordelia.

The mood is sad, desperately sad, the actress reflecting on how she cannot choose the ending for her character.

What links it to Shift/Shaft is the need to tell stories to help us remember who we are. In the case of Shift/Shaft, a woman has lost her bank of memories and must try to piece her life back together.

Good luck to her, but I lost the will to live as the words piled up.

Burnt Offerings & Bad Habits, Shift/Shaft, presented by A Quiet Word, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until April 9 (Box Office: 01904 623568).

Updated: 10:32 Friday, April 08, 2005