The Escapologist, Tramway, Glasgow

Deconstructing Harry Houdini

Paul (an excellent Kevin McMonagle) is a jaded, self-doubting psychotherapist who is resting on his laurels. He is distracted by his personal life, spends his spare time watching old Houdini films, and neglects his partner, Ruth, who takes up the piano in order to find a way not to leave him. His chair becomes an increasingly uncomfortable place from which he asks such pop-psych questions as "How do you feel about your father?" with rapidly diminishing enthusiasm. His characterisation suggests that psychotherapy is in part the following of a rigorous set of guidelines and in part a scrabbling around in the dark until you find the match that sparks illumination into the reaches of your patient's mind.

Paul's clients are a ragtag bunch of vulnerable and emotional cases, running the gamut of the social spectrum. Hence we have a bereaved doctor, an evasive, possibly psychotic builder and an impenetrable schoolgirl, very well played by Mary-Anne Lynch Small, who thinks that she disappears when she closes her eyes. All of them are escaping from something; the twist, of course, is that the psychotherapist is too.

This is a superbly slick production, perfectly choreographed by the director, Graham Eatough, to segue seamlessly between Simon Bent's suggestive prose, David Paul Jones's variations-on-a-theme soundtrack (which takes as its springboard Acker Bilk's Stranger on the Shore), and the inspired design and lighting by Laura Hopkins and Ian Scott.

The staging, "live action" stunts and all, is a mix of brilliant theatrical imagination, nifty technical work and a strong dose of nerve on the part of the exceptional cast, who clamber over precarious bits of set or appear trussed up in straitjackets, descending upside down on a rope from the towering ceiling of the Tramway, to illustrate Paul's fantastical daydreams. Paul's couch becomes a water-filled vat, for example, into which the straitjacketed patients are immersed, Houdini-like, an effect created by the projection of video images with pinpoint accuracy.

It's all very Suspect Culture, born of their method of creating work in which words, design and music contribute equally from the moment of inception, an approach that is always intriguing and satisfyingly holistic, but not always wholly successful. Despite being inventively and often humorously drawn together, the rather slow narrative has too many threads. There are underwritten characters - particularly Paul's partner, Ruth - although the excellent Selina Boyack, who also plays a thick-skinned but vulnerable doctor, succeeds in making something rather more of the character than the lines alone provide. Likewise, the builder's storyline doesn't quite capitalise on his increasingly dodgy revelations.

But, narrative niggles aside, this is an impressive production, with Bent raising some interesting, if not burning, questions about our search for answers, and our tendency to pop-psych our daily life into a banality that perhaps, in itself, constitutes an evasion tactic worthy of the greatest escapologist.

To 28 January (0141-422 2023); then touring to Drum, Plymouth (01752 267222), 2-18 February; and Everyman, Liverpool (0151-709 4776), 21-25 February