GET thee to Nunnery. Except that it’s too late because Liverpool playwright, poet, singer and songwriter Lizzie Nunnery was in York for one night only on her tour of Horny Handed Tons Of Soil.

Make sure to seek out her next piece in York because, like her nautical wartime memory play Narvik that visited the Theatre Royal Studio in 2017, this hour-long hymn to Liverpool and Mersey Sound poet, painter and performer Adrian Henri was a performance of high quality.

This time Nunnery was in the show herself – or more to the point she was the show – performing solo with jazz and electro musicians Martin Heslop, Martin Smith and Vidar Norheim gathered behind a white cloth, on which film and video imagery was projected, with more cloth, decorated with bricks, to the sides.

Taking her title and inspiration from a quote from one of Henri’s fragment poems, Nunnery’s Horny Handed Tons Of Soil fused electro-folk songs with beat poetry, theatrical storytelling and documentary film of Liverpool’s streets, from Granby Street to Cairns Street, recalling the now-missed past and sometimes questioning the present and future.

Whether singing hauntingly, or through the rhythmic spoken word, whether on the move, or stood beneath a patterned umbrella with slits to let the memories breathe, Nunnery spun a story of a child, a poet and Death wandering the city streets, as she evoked time and place . Those memories vie with dreams in a changing Liverpool, a city that by now felt familiar rather than a dot across the Pennines.