Faulty Optic is one of British theatre's best-kept secrets, a company that more than lives up to its name with its automated sets, loopy animated figures and out-of-focus snapshots of a world that is permanently on the blink.
Dating from 1991, but until now performed mostly abroad, this piece, featuring a puppet figure called Mabel who is half human and half sack and who has sad eyes that glitter like faraway stars, is as weird and unsettling as anything the company has produced. It appears to owe quite a lot to Philip Larkin ("They fuck you up your mum and dad" etc etc) and just as much to Dennis Nilsen. There is a terrible tenderness here in the way love kills.
Yet although the wind howls continually as if Mabel has become stranded in some emotional polar wasteland, there is a wicked and irresistible humour at work here too, both in the Heath Robinson-ish contraption that is Mabel's lifeline and in the absurdities of her existence. Insanity is never far away, and yet the great trick of the performance is that it convinces you of the logic of everything that Mabel does, however ridiculous and however appalling.
Music, a set that takes on a life of its own and Mabel's desperate, eloquent body language pile on the tension as her isolated, pitiful existence is interrupted by the arrival of an intruder who both threatens and offers a last grasp at freedom. What does it all signify? The horror of human contact and the excruciating pain of having none? The joy of finding your feet at last? I can't tell you, but I loved its sad, demented vision to bits, and bits - or at least body parts - is what it's all about.
Until January 20. Box office: 0171-930 3647. At the Lawrence Batley, Huddersfield, on January 28. Box office: 01484 430528
