We arrive full of expectation: we are to see a play written by Jon Haynes, one half of the excellent performance duo Ridiculusmus. Haynes greets us and says he has written a number of plays, none very successful, including one called The Penis that was "a major flop". But now he wants us to see The Poof Downstairs, which, he confides, is what his deeply unpleasant neighbours call him.
There is a bit of a problem, though: the rest of the cast haven't turned up. Haynes apologises profusely, but the show must go on. Instead of beginning the play, though, he sets out on a digression so circuitous it seems unlikely we will ever get anywhere at all, let alone back to where we started. Still, it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, and Haynes's apology becomes an apparently autobiographical entertainment in which he plays a roll call of friends and acquaintances, including his dead mother, mad brother, neighbour, father and, perhaps most intriguingly, an Eton contemporary named Fat Dave who is now a politician with a wife named Sam.
At the end, as we leave, we are handed a cast sheet for The Poof Downstairs featuring three actors. Have we just seen it, or not? What is true and what is false? What is fiction and what is autobiography? I'm not sure I really care, because though this 70 minutes is mildly entertaining and throws up some interesting asides on storytelling and theatre, it never develops much beyond its opening conceit, and too often seems like a bewildering theatrical in-joke.
