Wendy Houstoun has mastered many modes of solo performance. She can do bitter, free-fall comedy and lonely confessional, she can do surreal monologues in the style of Beckett and she can dance. In this latest show, she does all these things very well. Maybe the fact that they don't add up to anything is the point.
At the centre of the show is a female performer, Houstoun, who has become a live recycling bin for media debris. As she drifts back and forth between the centre of the stage and a stash of ancient vinyls and cassettes on the side, her body is assailed by old tunes, old movies, old TV shows and old dances. Part of her fate is to be bandied between their different performing styles, so that her opening act - a brassy cabaret hostess, struggling to get her routine right - flips into the tough posturings of a minor rock singer, followed by the fraught musical juggling of a DJ. She is also required to mime a chilling accompaniment to a murderous movie scene and to rehearse sequences of concentrated, introvert dance.
Crammed between Houstoun's live spots are bits of film footage that jump, with no evident logic, from blindfolded women playing in the snow to a surfer's beach. Houstoun's battered and bombarded performer tries to make sense of these materials by inventing narratives that might conceivably connect them. She launches into a lurid squib of a story about a woman involved in the mob, which is revisited during a brilliantly ingenious dance solo. Here Houstoun uses the choreography as a story board to improvise some more melodramatic scenes. The various parts of her body become comically autonomous protagonists ("legs trying to escape, hands shooting free") in a plot of surreal crime and romance.
Houstoun's performer stands for anyone who has ever had problems filtering out the media images surrounding them, or who has ever used the wrong systems to makes sense of the world. One false trail, one wrong storyline, and they are adrift from the mainstream. But while Houstoun does some very clever short takes on this subject, the show goes only half the distance. Is this performer a visionary or a loser, an artist or a victim? Too much of the show is so meandering and off the wall that somewhere we lose interest in the answers.
· At the Lilian Baylis Theatre, London EC1 (020-7863 8000), on March 7 and 8.
