In this bizarre and hypnotic solo show, performed as part of the Dublin theatre festival, Marie Brassard transforms the problem that plagues most monologue-based work - who is the speaker addressing? - into one of the piece's greatest assets.
This is arthouse theatre at its most self-aware, but what stops it feeling like a cold intellectual exercise is the way that Brassard (who also wrote and directed) uses the actor's dilemma as a metaphor for lost love.
One of Quebec director Robert Lepage's principal collaborators for many years, Brassard has clearly picked up some deep knowledge about how to compel an audience by setting up expectations and then revealing an even more enthralling truth.
She is sitting on stage with her back to the audience as the audience enter, black hair cascading down her naked back. She starts to weep, her sobs amplified through a microphone. As she turns to face us and puts on the jacket of her oversized suit, she explains that her name is Jimmy and that she is a gay Manhattan hairdresser who was imagined into being, at the age of 33, by the fantasies of an American military general. Jimmy fell in love with a client named Mitchell and was about to kiss him when the general died (clearly unable to cope with harbouring homosexual urges). After hanging out in the existential waiting room for a while, Jimmy was reborn in the fantasies of a Montreal actress who desires him - but all he wants is to recapture that moment of bliss with Mitchell.
Now that actress (Brassard herself) is performing Jimmy's life for us, embodying different characters along the way including Jimmy as a boy and the actress's mother. Her voice is manipulated through a synthesizer that changes its tone and pitch, which not only adds texture to the evening but allows Brassard to perform the kind of unfussy acting for which Lepage's work is renowned. The synthesizer is also a distancing device, and just when one starts to wonder if we'll ever see the (real) Marie, she pulls off a jaw-droppingly brave act of self-exposure - too integral to reveal here, but what a corker. Only a few longeurs in Jimmy's storytelling let the energy drop in this extraordinary creation.
· Until October 12. Box office: 00 353 1 817 3333.
