It is 1950 and Jimmy, a gay New York hairdresser, is about to have a first kiss with the object of his desire -Mitchell. He leans forward, their lips are about to touch - and at that moment everything stops. For, in this solo performance by Québécois actress Marie Brassard, Jimmy is not flesh and blood but a dream figure in the sub-conscious of a homophobic American general about to go to Korea. What's more, the general has just died, leaving Jimmy marooned in some netherworld and at the whim of other dreamers, including a Canadian actress Jimmy finds horribly unattractive.
Apparently, Brassard spent two years writing down her dreams before creating this performance, but it is not long into this tricksy and uninvolving 70 minutes that you start wondering whether all she has created is a theatrical nightmare. There are worlds within worlds here as reality and the subconscious collide, and Brassard - who is a powerful and striking stage presence and who creates the voice of Jimmy to weirdly compelling effect using a synthesiser - certainly captures some of erotic tension and longing of the interrupted dream.
The piece, however, never probes with any depth into the strange, still unexplored frontier-land that is our dreamlike state and its intimate relation with our waking world, nor considers the implications of the fact that we all carry a parallel universe around with us in our brains. The show is also unnecessarily complicated in construction, and offers the audience very little of visual interest. In the end, it merely serves to prove that while we all find our own nighttime adventures fascinating, other people's dreams are mostly very dull.
· Until July 3. Box office: 0845 120 7515.
