On the surface, I Can't Wake Up is an urbane concoction of sea captains, satin gowns and the social round of Lyme Regis. But surfaces are not what Told by an Idiot, Britain's barmiest physical theatre ensemble, are about. Rather, they descend to the deepest recesses of memory and desire, stirring emotional currents that make the madcap seem genuinely moving.
It's tricky to identify the precise tone of this wilfully anachronistic Regency romp, but it's rather like what might happen if Jane Austen were afflicted with Tourette syndrome, and all that clipped understatement were spewed forth in an eruption of libidinous bad manners.
If there's a thread to the narrative anarchy of Paul Hunter's story, it concerns the mental disintegration of a Napoleonic sea captain, one William Mallen, played with bilious gusto by Hunter himself. Mallen becomes prey to Richard Clews's gruesome saw-bones of a surgeon, under whose regime he loses his left leg, his marriage and his senses. His pretty Swiss spouse, played with palpable anxiety by Catherine Marmier, offers futile ministrations, absorbs the abuse and attempts to maintain an air of decorum.
The show becomes a parable of the frustrations of caring for the incurable, which gives the relationship between the sea captain and his wife an unbearable poignancy. The narrative flits skittishly between their nervous introduction and first, tentative minuet - to the strains of Slade's C'mon Feel the Noize - to the captain's Bedlam ravings as he flips between channels on a microwave oven. The scene in which sausage rolls become a metaphor for carnal desire could attain classic status.
John Wright's impressively sustained production stretches the three-way relationship between wife, doctor and patient as far as it can conceivably go with an unflagging physical ingenuity. The visual gags are an aid to understanding character, rather than a virtuoso bag of tricks. Unlike many devised performances, Told by an Idiot's is about self-discovery rather than self-indulgence. This is quite the most methodical form of madness.
Ends tonight (0151-709 4988), then tours.
