Ailun Zhou brings their debut solo show The Last Self Tape to The Cockpit this month, offering a raw and honest look at life as an actor in today’s digital age.
The play explores the pressures of self-taping and the isolation that has become routine for performers, while telling the story of Chloe—a character navigating ambition, identity, and survival.
The Last Self Tape runs at The Cockpit on Thursday 27 and Friday 28 November 2025. Book tickets now here.
You’re bringing The Last Self Tape to The Cockpit, what can you tell us about the show?
The Last Self Tape is a sixty-minute one-woman show that takes the form of a self-tape which slowly collapses into a confession. What begins as a routine audition becomes an excavation of memory, identity, and survival.
At the centre of the piece is Chloe — a woman who has been trapped inside her home, and inside herself, for almost two years. This self-tape is the first time she’s tried to step back into the world. What looks like a simple audition becomes her attempt to save herself.
The audience watches a performer trying to “do the job,” while the room, the camera, and her own silence begin to demand a different kind of truth. It’s intimate, unsettling, and ultimately hopeful — a piece about what it costs to be seen, and what it takes to reclaim your life when you’ve been frozen for too long.
What inspired you to create this piece, and how much of it draws from your own experiences as a performer?
The piece grew out of years of self-taping — the repetition, the loneliness, and the strange hyper-clarity that happens when you stare into a lens trying to be “your best version.” As a performer, I realised that the self-tape room isn’t just a technical setup anymore; it has become a psychological space where identity, ambition, and fear collide.
During development, I worked closely with our director, Robert Price. His perspective helped me push the story far beyond anything autobiographical and into something more universal.
Certain emotional textures are familiar to me — the pressure to look composed, the private collapse behind the frame, the moments when a tape accidentally captures something more honest than the audition itself. But Chloe is not me. She is a completely fictional character: an amalgamation of observations, of conversations with friends, and of the hidden struggles many performers carry but rarely articulate.
The play uses the self-tape format as a lens to explore a broader question: what happens when a person is forced to confront themselves in the most unforgivingly quiet room?
The play explores the impact of self-taping and isolation on actors. What do you think this says about the current state of the industry?
It reveals an industry in transition — expanding, streamlining, and, at the same time, quietly eroding the human foundations it relies on.
On a purely industrial level, self-taping makes complete sense. From a market perspective, it’s efficient. Time is money, and producers need fast, flexible pipelines. I completely understand that.
But on the level of the individual — on the level of the human being who is actually doing the work — the shift comes at a cost that we don’t talk about enough.
Self-taping pushes actors into an increasingly solitary position. If you’re not naturally well-connected or constantly networking, you can end up spending your days alone in a room recording take after take, sending them into a void, and receiving no feedback at all. That has a real psychological impact. It creates a sense of invisibility that can be very hard to survive, not only professionally but emotionally.
And here’s the irony: the actors most affected are often the ones who carry the most artistic sensitivity — the ones whose talent is best discovered in a room, in energy, in presence, not through a rectangle on a laptop screen. When those people become harder for the system to see, it’s not just a personal loss. It’s an artistic loss for the entire industry. If we reduce everything to pure efficiency, then we have to ask ourselves honestly: What happens to the art?
Most actors do not control capital. They don’t have power. They’re just trying to stay in the game, in a global economy that isn’t kind to anyone right now. And many are stuck in a loop of endless self-tapes, like Chaplin’s factory worker tightening the same bolt again and again — except now the machine is digital and invisible.
I’m not saying we should abandon self-tapes. They’re here to stay, and they do increase access. But I think we need to pay far more attention to the human cost baked into this system — to the silence, the isolation, the sense of shouting into an empty room.
Chloe’s story is deeply personal and layered. How did you approach bringing this character to life?
I approached Chloe as someone constantly negotiating with herself. On the surface, she knows exactly how to stay composed — because the industry rewards that — but underneath she carries grief, memory, humour, ambition, and a fierce need for honesty.
I don’t believe a person finds wholeness through success or external approval. What truly changes us is an inner movement — faith, conscience, and the willingness to face ourselves. So when shaping Chloe, her flashbacks and interruptions became the way she searches for the part of herself she’s been cut off from.
My process was to let her two voices coexist: the performer who smiles for the camera, and the inner voice that keeps breaking through. Chloe emerges in the friction between them — and every crack in her performance is a moment where her real self appears.
The staging is minimal, with just a camera and a room. How does that affect the audience’s experience?
The minimalism creates a cold, empty, almost home-less world. With just a room and a camera, the audience steps into the same mental space Chloe is trapped in — a space that appears free but is shaped by her own limits.
You’ll see rubbish on the floor, while the small area inside the camera frame is spotless. Her life is chaotic; her image is clean. That tension is the trap.
There’s nowhere to hide. The silence presses in, and the camera becomes both witness and judge.
And in the end, the point is simple: in our era, what confines a person is rarely the room itself. It’s the mind — the constant noise, fear and self-monitoring. Even in an empty space, Chloe cannot walk out.
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see The Last Self Tape?
If you’ve ever questioned who you are when no one is watching — or when a camera is — this piece will speak to you. It’s raw, intimate, and cuts close to the truth.
And although it enters some dark places, it doesn’t leave you there. There is real hope in it — not sentiment, but the quiet strength that comes from looking at yourself honestly.
In a time like ours, we all need that kind of kindness. Come ready to sit close. The show happens inches from the truth — and it gives you something to walk away with.
