There are times when every performer wishes that time could be spun into reverse, and particular performances erased. This was one of those occasions for Mindy Smith, who croaked and stumbled through her set as though she was trapped inside a recurring nightmare. Unfortunately, the audience could hear her screams.

Maybe she was ill, maybe she was exhausted, or maybe it was like she said - she'd been partying too hard and drinking too much whisky.

Whatever the explanation, the upper register of her voice had vanished entirely ("I feel like Bea Arthur," she joked feebly, clutching at her larynx and unaware that the name she really meant to drop was Dot Cotton) and her mind was playing strange tricks. As she reached the climax of One Moment More, a song about her mother's death from cancer and probably the most anguished piece in her repertoire, she suddenly stopped playing her guitar and muttered that she couldn't remember whether she'd sung the last verse or not. As she stood there trying to make sense of what was happening, the audience clapped reassuringly, but it was an extraordinary aberration - the kind of moment that could make you fear for the artist's life.

This sort of thing inflicts sudden death on your capacity to suspend your disbelief, so the whole show becomes a sequence of fraught moments, each one disconnected from the next. As it happened, she worked her way to the end fairly successfully, give or take a few vanishing high notes and a palpable lack of empathy between Smith and her mandolin player Rex Price. But it was like watching a wounded animal trying to drag itself to safety.

The tone of terminal self-pity didn't help. She prefaced Gillian Welch's Orphan Girl with the announcement that she was adopted, and introduced Raggedy Ann by explaining that it was "a song about growing up and hating my life". When she left the stage, it was large whiskies and sighs of relief all round.