Why Me?

The room he finds himself in is filled with pseudo-scientific equipment, diagrams of the human condition on the wall, and two factotums frustrated that someone from their human production line just won't get on with his life. Niven Ganner is stern and uncompromising with his white coat and clipboard; doesn't the man know how lucky he is to have this life? Matt Rothwell as his assistant is hyperactive and curious, triggering yet more confusion and playing with the uncertainty.

The man eventually tries this life, but it's "awful" out there, as he crosses Tom Barry in a range of guises as the embodiment of the external world, and particularly unnerving as the smarmy bank manager. He returns with more questions, but as they pile up he can get neither answers nor peace from them, and he realises he can never go back to unthinking acceptance.

The writing by Ben Moores, who also plays the man, is comic and mesmeric in the quick-witted interplay and the rhyming stream of consciousness monologues. Ideas appear and succeed each other with such rapidity they swirl around bringing the man more confusion than insight. There are so many ideas and metaphors crammed into this play, some border on cliché, but then again, don't our own thoughts? Some are memorable - the watch that ticks louder and faster, for time is everything to the watch and it hates to see it wasted.

During the show the diagrams that initially stuck to the walls started to lose their adhesion and fall to the floor, somehow it was an apt metaphor for the thoughts that wouldn't stick, that slipped away. It may be baffling, but it is enjoyably so, as the delighted puzzlement in the bar afterwards attested. I think this may be a show I'll still be mulling over long after the Fringe has moved on - just make sure you don't lock me in there."