I wasn’t satisfied and did a little digging, and found scans of a few fringe theatre programmes from the late eighties. Olivia Jouval trained at England’s prestigious Beauchamp University performing arts department from 1978 to 1981, but there’s no record of her graduating. Rashida Barnes was there at the same time and I could uncover a little more about her. She attended Beauchamp on highly competitive full scholarships for dancing and theatre practice. Unlike Olivia Jouval, she did graduate, but she seems to have had a quiet career until the Metamuse breakthrough. The only pre-Metamuse records of her name I could find were in the credits of a dance production called Ex-stasis: The World in Six Discrete Movements which toured Coventry, Bristol, Den Haag, Rotterdam, Lille and Lyon in 1988 as part of an educational collective, giving theatre experience to kids from state schools, and in the acknowledgements of a programme for an ‘expressive reaction piece’ from 1989 funded by the now defunct Artists’ Support Network based in Birmingham, England, that played during the Midlands Art Festival. After that, she seems to have gone as dark as Jouval.

There’s a lot of rumour and false information, of course, the sort of digital crap that fills any quiet space on the internet. Hints about murder and steamy affairs, a particularly pernicious strand on the more obsessive fan boards about a tragic love affair, or triangle, or quadrangle, but nothing substantiated or worth delving into, unless you want to emerge hours later with a headache and feeling very dirty. Real facts about Jouval and Barnes are thin on the ground.

So the fact that they’ve turned up again decades later, presenting highly technical and extremely confident bleeding-edge work that’s creating a querulous buzz, is quite a surprise. Where have they been hiding all these years? I asked myself if they were even the same people who were at the Beauchamp Drama Society in 1981, but it’s clear enough from comparing the photos in the college yearbooks with the new material on the website and the Metamuse Instagram that it’s them. In her pictures, Jouval reminds me a lot of Cindy Sherman – that chameleonic face that can be contorted in a hundred ways, but still remains distinctly herself. Rashida Barnes has more of a classic, raven beauty, but with the right hair, make-up and couture could also be confused with any of two dozen current pop stars or A-list actors. But I’m diverging from my point. Jouval and Barnes aren’t in this show – it’s not about them. Along with the invisible magical pixies of their Metamuse company, they made it, and Idiopathy is about you.

I’d better try to talk you through it now, hadn’t I?

Sorry, just one more aside while I remember it – I don’t think Jouval is even Olivia’s real name. It’s not a common name, and it’s suspiciously close to the birth name of the nineteenth-century French feminist, Olympe Audouard, who was born Félicité-Olympe de Jouval. Change Olympe to Olivia to be more palatable to a contemporary English audience? But if it is a pseudonym, she was using it back when she was registered as a student at Beauchamp, which would imply quite a long-term commitment to fakery. Which would be perfectly appropriate for an actor, you might say.