The question on my lips for the first few minutes: what on God's earth is he doing? In very few words, Greg is telling Doris Day to take a running jump. Her fans needn't be offended: Ms Day hardly features in this bizarre, thought-provoking show of strange noises and expressions.Greg's point is actually more subtle: Doris Day is a chimp. No, wait... umm. It gets deeper, though it’s a little confusing at first. At the heart of this one-man show is a concern for the death of imprecision, a despair at the misuse of language and, I guess, a mild reclaiming of the true communicative power of song.Through clever questions posed annoyingly to unwitting members of the public, along with a series of wacky mimes, dances and songs, Greg explores the way in which we spare little thought for our responses these days, individual words losing impact. Through singing the entire show, we see how one has to think harder about their lexical choices and are often clearer this way.Well-informed references to Saussure's 'signifiers' and exemplification of the Chinese language show that he isn't just a nutter, but some of his ideas could be better followed through in their development.He's clever, and with sectioning and isolating techniques he creates music from noises and recorded speech with some degree of technical sophistication. It's fascinating, entrancing. At the end, he uses his physicality to express the damage, continuing just long enough for him to glisten with sweat, his audience awed.While in the Cabaret Bar, this is neither cabaret, nor music or musical theatre. Yes, there is singing, and yes, it is good. Not all of it is technically proficient, but it's all illustrative and sometimes deliberately dubious, that it might sound all the better in certain segments.A one-man show that isn't comic or biographical (often with music) should surely struggle, but this doesn't. Captivating from start to finish, he could probably have bedded half the (sadly lacking) audience. The show left a lasting impression on me: look out for me, 'cause I'll definitely be 'running away to Doris Day' sometime soon.
