As a designated panto-free zone, the Royal Exchange can usually be relied on to come up with an alternative Christmas offering. In keeping with tradition, what finer way to celebrate the season than with a classic screwball caper featuring the Easter bunny?
Mary Coyle Chase's 1944 play about the heart-warming bond of friendship between a man and a 6ft imaginary rabbit was written, the author claimed, simply to alleviate wartime gloom. Yet to do so, she reached deep into her Celtic ancestry, delving into the same mythological pool of animal spirits from which the long-eared bearer of chocolate eggs is believed to derive.
It wouldn't do to take Greg Hersov's thoroughly enjoyable production too seriously - it is, after all, seasonal fluff of the silliest order. Yet Chase's play is, in its quiet way, a remarkable study of the shifting border between sanity and madness, and a celebration of the mild loopiness without which the world would undoubtedly be a poorer place. As Ben Keaton's excellent Elwood says in defence of his imaginary pal: "Doctor, I wrestled with reality for 40 years and am happy to state that I have now got reality just where I want it."
Keaton's masterfully downbeat display of deferential, hat-tipping delusion is surrounded with a slew of equally well-judged comic performances. Polly Hemingway, as Elwood's commanding sister, and Amy Phillips, as his unmarried niece, palpably pulsate with the frustration of finding an eligible young man prepared to marry into the family of a giant rabbit. And in the sanatorium scenes, Milo Twomey and James Smith are perfect examples of physicians in urgent need of healing themselves. It's all topped off by a towering performance by the 6ft bunny himself: or did I just imagine that?
· Until January 7. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
