Felt like being caught on the moors in a storm: Keeley Forsyth, at the Barbican, reviewed

It took a moment to realise Keeley Forsyth was there. There were already three musicians, faint figures on a dark stage, wreathed in dry ice. And then, to their side, one became aware of a patch of darkness that was a little darker than the rest, and which seemed to be moving. Even when she moved into the slightly less gloomy part of the stage, Forsyth remained hidden: this was a show of startling unease and intensity. ‘Well, she’s spectacular,’ one chap ahead of me said to his friend as they filed down the stairs at the end. ‘Not sure I could manage more than an hour of it, though.’

Forsyth is best known as an actor, in the kind of things everyone watches on a Sunday night (she could have competed for either side in the Heartbeat vs Peak Practice special edition of Family Fortunes on which she appeared), but when she started releasing music a couple of years ago it was certainly not with the intention of providing accompaniment to scenes of rural policing or medicine in bygone ages. Her two brief albums so far – Debris two years ago, Limbs this year – are stark, unnerving things, less collections of songs than rookeries in bare trees. For an easier signifier of how bleak it was live, there was a harmonium player on stage. The last time I saw a harmonium on a stage, it was being played by the late German chanteuse Nico, as she intoned her songs about unending misery. The harmonium is the ship-trapped-in-ice of musical instruments, wheezing and creaking and cracking. Of course it suits music that sweats unease.