Harry Kellerman is a mathematician incarcerated in a mental hospital after a suicide attempt. He insists that he has lost his wife and child. The psychiatrist says that Harry has never been married and is suffering from delusions. Harry knows that the doctor is wrong. Could the answer lie in Harry's notebooks and the pages of complex equations that he has scrawled across the pages?
Drawing on string theory and the butterfly effect, Imitating the Dog's latest show is a tense and atmospheric thriller that plays with both the theatrical possibilities of physics and the physical possibilities of theatre. It will strike a chord with anyone who has questioned the nature of memories, or has longed to change a tiny moment in the past.
Played across several levels, looking at times like a graphic novel and at others like a wartime film, Kellerman sweeps back and forth across the centuries while constantly offering its audience different perspectives on a story that is as shifting and unstable as time itself.
Laura Hopkins's brilliant stage design, which telescopes up and down so that you are sometimes looking through a peephole and at others appearing to get a wider picture (or looking down on the action), creates its own fascinating layers of uncertainty.
But while I admired the company's grasp of the mechanics of theatre and its visual flair, I found the density of the piece overwhelming. For all its atmospheric power, it fails to make you care about Harry.
