Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

Half Moon Theatre, Cork

For this monologue on a vagrant’s resilient odyssey Lovett remains physically and almost totally in one place yet seems in constant movement, his body leaning forward or back, his head turning sideways, his arms and hands articulate as they express a commentary on a text which, infused with the amiable logic of the alienated, has reminiscences of Flann O’Brien. Written in 1946 and collected in Stories and Texts for Nothing, both pieces are meditations on solitariness, of adapting to what is predicted and of looking back, as if clinically researching that adaptation.