Chris Goode is best known for devised work, but there's no doubt King Pelican is a play - an extraordinary one that pecks at your heart and tickles your brain. I can't say I understood it all; I suspect that requires more than one viewing, and possibly a lifetime of living. But like its protagonist, nonsense poet and painter Edward Lear, sitting at his beloved sister's bedside, it made me weep like an over-ripe cheese. It offers the melancholy madness of Lear, and his Shakespearian namesake, with a treatise on ways of seeing and being in art, the theatre and life. There is something very wistful and unguarded about it.
Entering the theatre is a surprise. The stage looks set for Murder at the Vicarage. What follows initially appears to be a traditional bio-drama, albeit a hugely funny one, as Lear faces personal and professional crises: his sister Ann is dying, his unresolved sexuality is a source of distress, and he still clings to the idea that he is a painter, dismissing his verse as "scribbly-bibbly marginalia".
But the arrival of Johnny, a delivery boy bringing an unexpected gift, offers Lear the potential for liberation - if he has the courage to reach out to the future being offered. As old certainties collapse, the theatre collapses, too; past and future leak into each other, the wall between spectators and performers is smashed, and the owl and the pussycat sail away. It is shocking and exhilarating, playful and serious; Gerard Bell as Lear, Maggie Henderson as Ann and Jonny Liron as Johnny perform with great grace.
• This article was amended on Sunday 15 March 2009. Gerard, not Gerald, Bell plays Edward Lear in the Drum theatre's production of King Pelican on now in Plymouth. This has been corrected.
