There's more chortling than belly laughing in Told By An Idiot's piece of galleys humour about an 18th-century sea-captain who loses his mind after losing his leg.
Based on a story by Paul Hunter, John Wright's production carries a fair cargo of comic invention and navigates a course through playful anachronisms. So, period scenes are segued with glam rock, our hero watches Coronation Street on telly and sends e-mails while rounding Cape Horn in his boat.
Otherwise, there's not enough in Hunter's story to make the daffiness any more seaworthy. At one level, it's a parody of hospital and period dramas on TV. But there's also a sense that the story is seeking a little more melancholy in all its tomfoolery. In particular, the captain's dementia is supposed to sadden his wife, yet the poles of the story are less comedy and tragedy than absurdism and silliness - even down to the captain playing with his food.
The show works best in the acting and it's always good to watch Told By An Idiot hamming it up. Wright's direction in association with Hayley Carmichael takes great delight in transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Foul language becomes a gale-force wind, a boot brush becomes a TV remote control, while a writing desk is turned into the captain's body breathing its last. Meanwhile, Naomi Wilkinson's design rigs the action on the sail of a ship, which spills down elegantly from a yard arm.
Richard Clews, as the amputating naval doctor, is a creepy Nosferatu figure. He wriggles with furtive desire for Catherine Marmier as an innocent French wife, who is only faintly disturbed by her husband's mental confusion. Otherwise, it's a one-man show for Hunter who plays the dotty captain with chubby, red-faced aplomb. He is sublimely oblivious to his schoolmasterish superiority complex one minute and is childishly manipulative the next. But it's hardly a test of his talents - more like plain sailing.
I Can't Wake Up
