Honesty is not always the best policy. For most of us, the truth is best applied sparingly, not sprayed around. But Dave, a man nursing a pint and an emotional crisis in the corner of the pub, is addicted to the truth, so much so that he can't even tell his 10-year-old nephew his drawing is lovely, which would have been a well-meant lie.
But as Oscar Wilde once observed: "If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out." In Dave's case, he finds himself out, after insulting his despised civil service boss. He then embarks on a drunken odyssey through the nether regions of London. Fuelled by booze and anger, spewing vomit and insults, he finally lands in a suburban garden. Here, as dawn breaks, he has the possibility of redemption.
This one-man show – performed in the Mailcoach pub just around the corner from the Royal and Derngate theatre, which is producing it – may be a bare 45 minutes, but it is fabulously sustained and mordantly funny. DC Moore's sinewy script, overflowing with the rages of everyday life, gets the performance it deserves from Thomas Morrison. He makes the misanthropic Dave an appealing character, as he goes off in search of the truth, and himself, armed with only four cans of lager and some cheese-and-onion hula hoops.
In fact, Morrison inhabits Dave so completely that, on opening night, he dealt with unscripted interventions from a member of the audience as if they were part of the performance. It may be only a play, another kind of lie, but it gets you where it hurts.
