HEADLONG

Most contemporary playwrights dealing in sensations serve them to us straight these days, and Anthony Neilson, one of the most talented, is no exception. But in this intriguing 2002 mini-extravaganza, revived by Rupert Goold's Headlong touring company and smartly directed by Steve Marmion, we revert to a Victorian freak show.

The device of a travelling freak-show is not just a sweetener, though, but is fully enjoyed for its own sake, as evident in the design, fully maintained in the lighting of Malcolm Rippeth, the atmospheric soundtrack of composer Tom Mills and the succession of theatrical tricks involving disembodied heads, swishing scenic curtains, flickering footlights and copious squirtings and spurtings of various liquids and bodily fluids.

It's hard to resist a piece where the tone is, for the most part, so deliciously maintained, and in which an ardent lover deserts his mistress for an expressive oyster who has mystery; Gant is seen discussing the next move with his chum, stretched out on a small table standing at 90 degrees to the floor; and a chinless wonder places his faith in curing spiritual pain through meditation, song and deep massage.

Hailed as the "most astonishing testaments" by the eponymous Mr Gant, yet dismissed by one of his actors as "an unintelligible travelling vanity project by an opium-addicted buffoon who thinks himself a visionary", this revival of Anthony Neilson's darkly funny 2002 play is a joyously grotesque, Monty Pythonesque curiosity. Roaming his carnival stage in top hat and tails, the irrepressible Gant (Simon Kunz) evokes the most fantastic incidents, romantic yearnings and murkiest underbellies of Victoriana in a series of gleefully compelling vignettes.

Aspiring to entertainment as much as art, Amazing Feats of Loneliness boasts some wickedly funny lines and knockabout acting from Paul Barnhill, Emma Handy and Sam Cox. Yet throughout, the role of storytelling in expressing and easing pain remains a constant. Like his fakir, Neilson drills aggressively into the human psyche and exposes the ugliness and fears that co-exist with the beauty and magnificence of our imagination.

'Prodigy! Soldier! Traveller! Poet! But always and ever a showman!' So goes the self-deifying legend of Edward Gant, MC of the travelling freak-show in Anthony Neilson's increasingly dark 2002 pastiche of the Good Old Days era.

With his troupe of players, Gant regales us with increasingly fantastical yarns...it's as if The Mighty Boosh had re-imagined Shockheaded Peter by way of an old Amicus Films horror compendium. Following what may possibly be the longest dramatic pause this side of Pinter, however, the play is ripped asunder, so the "unique visions" and "terrible truths" propagated by Gant are laid bare as something more Pirandellian. Through the figure of proto ranting poet Ludd, a debate between his favoured social-realism and the trashily magical populist fantasias of Gant is set up. This makes for an enthralling Russian doll of a play, which, in Steve Marmion's touring co-production between Headlong and Southampton's Nuffield Theatre, gradually unravels a delicious concoction of artifice and truth. With a cast led by Simon Kunz as Gant mesmerising throughout, the normally bottled-up black thoughts that are uncorked may be make-believe, but they go way beyond intimations of harmless fun.