If you added together all the moments in your life when you felt totally free, totally happy, how many minutes would it add up to? And why are we always chasing these moments but never quite catching them?
There's humour here too, real laugh out loud moments of absurdity.
Nick Field's new odyssey, 'Adventure/Misadventure', explores these questions with a beautifully unfolding tale of travel and wanderlust.
Escaping from a crap job, crap relationship and crap life, Field took himself off round the world in search of 'moments of being'. On the way he found himself dancing on stage at the Rio Carnival, playing games of Geisha Chasing in the back streets of Tokyo and swimming in a capsule hotel with a gaggle of naked Japanese businessmen.
Told through precise and lucid prose, ritualised movement, singing and harp playing, this show verges on performance art but is rescued from that particular label by a clear narrative arc. The world tour is a whistlestop one, our heart racing with Field's pace. Then all of a sudden there's a slowing down, a slow-mo halting at a 'moment of being'. It is relived, retold, affirmed. Then the pace picks up again, racing towards the next precious morsel of existence.
Wearing an odd one-sleeved jacket, Field is a less than confident presence on stage and at times, when he loses a handle on the script, the whole show nearly slides away from him, but in a way this is the charm of the piece. There's a vunerability to the man, a sweetness. He is likeable and you root for him in his existential quest. After all, life itself is a bit fluffed, a bit slippery.
There's humour here too, real laugh out loud moments of absurdity.
If he could only relax a little into the performance and tighten the script towards the end, this would be a smasher of a show. As it is, it's still a show worth catching.
