Nothing became Mick's life, it seems, so much as the manner of his leaving it - in a drunken heap at the bottom of the stairs. He is shabby and unreliable, and the world will get on fine without him. But his passing leaves a Mick-shaped hole in his familiar milieu of the Bull's Head, and Robert Farquhar's elegiac new play steals in to fill the gap.
Farquhar's fizzing, quotidian poetry has been making waves in the north-west for some time, with recent pieces such as God's Official and Kissing Sid James moving on from Liverpool's tiny but funky Unity Theatre to the bigger venues of the Bolton Octagon, Hull Truck and Oldham Coliseum. While the subject matter of his tangy tabloid theatre is mundane to the point of anonymity, his forte is embedding minute detail into general linguistic clutter.
Farquhar's language is not unlike his dead hero's flat. It is in a shocking state - false trails and parentheses all over the place, dramatic threads festering undeveloped beneath accumulated non sequiturs. It sounds horrible, but there's something unusually compelling, not to mention bleakly hilarious, about this reckless untidiness, like waiting for a stack of dirty plates to collapse.
The action involves little more than getting Mick cremated, his flat cleared and his ashes scattered in Scotland. But it becomes more than this: a heavy-lidded, hungover speculation on death presented as a dramatic poem for the three voices of Henry, Kev and Holly, a trio of misfits on the margins of life imperceptibly pulled together by the absence of Mick.
Sarah Thornton's meticulous production makes good use of nothing - just three characters caught in space by crosscurrents of language. Farquhar is adept at creating the impression of everybody talking at once without the sense degenerating into babble, and the performances are miracles of finely nuanced verbosity.
Ron Meadows cuts a louche, distracted figure as Mick's drinking pal Henry, startled that he is the one rung up in the middle of the night to identify a body. The first thought to cross the mind of Mick's estranged wife Holly, touchingly played by Jane Hogarth, is that she once had sex with someone who is now dead. Kev's relationship with the deceased is more ambivalent still: Warren Donnelly delightfully plays him as a neurotic bystander who got roped into someone else's tragedy. At the end, I still had absolutely no idea who Mick was. But I will miss him.
Ends tomorrow. Box office: 0151-709 4988.
