Photograph: Marilyn Kingwill
"Hello. Thank you for coming. Thank you for not going someplace else." The speaker is Victor and for 80 minutes he makes quite a performance out of his life gone wrong. "There is," says Victor, "a fundamental difference between weird and fucked up. You are born weird, you get fucked up. I'm fucked up."
We may beg to differ, and that is the problem with this award-winning play from leading Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor. The writing that charts Victor's life is wired and wild, but the subject is a narrow one: Victor and only Victor. With his tales of a mother possessed by the devil, a father who is the saddest man in the world and a sister in love with a dog, MacIvor creates a complete world. But it is a skewed one that has no connection with reality.
What makes the evening enjoyable is the look-no-hands exhilaration of the writing and a performance from Trevor White - all bulging eyes and twitchy hands - that gets under your skin. This is a tour de force. The structure of the show is intriguing too. Quite what the title House refers to is ambiguous. Clearly it is a reference to the home Victor shared with his wife. But perhaps it refers to the theatre itself. "Nice theatre," says Victor, wandering into the auditorium. "Nice if you like that kind of thing. Nice if you like fringe." He spits the word "fringe" as if it is toxic. Or maybe this virtuoso performance is simply an alternative to a group therapy session. In the end you just have to accept Victor's assertion: "It's not a show, it's my life." But to be successful at both living and acting, you have to be a pretty convincing liar.
· Until February 25. Box office: 0870 400 0838.
