Finest entrance of the year is made by Paul Blair in The Escapologist. Suspended by his feet, he edges down to the stage head-first from the high Tramway ceiling, dressed in a straitjacket. Wriggling free, he dusts himself down and takes his place on a therapist's couch.
The striking opening image in Suspect Culture's show takes its cue from Houdini's Box, the 2001 pop psychotherapy book in which Adam Phillips draws comparisons between Harry Houdini's desire to escape and the impulse in all of us to flee the things we fear. Once Houdini has escaped one impossible trap, all he can do is escape another. In psychological terms, argues Phillips, many of us behave in exactly the same way. To call The Escapologist an adaptation of Houdini's Box might be stretching a point, but playwright Simon Bent has taken a smattering of dialogue here, a character study there, and fashioned a play that is similarly beguiling and elliptical.
Through the eyes of a therapist, played by a lugubrious Kevin McMonagle, we meet a doctor in denial about the pain of her father's death, a builder refusing to acknowledge his role in his wife's departure and a young girl failing to accept her mother's new lover. Like the therapist, who has neuroses of his own, they find it easier to escape the room than face the truth about themselves.
Directed at a stately pace by Graham Eatough, The Escapologist draws you in with its meditative soul-searching, live piano score by David Paul Jones and understated technological tricks. Like the book that inspired it, it never quite gets to the point. But that's deliberate - there is no finishing point, no final answer to the therapeutic process. The audience may feel as though they were watching the raw material for a play rather than the play itself, but it's fascinating raw material all the same.
· Until January 28. Box office: 0845 330 3501. Then touring.
