Marny Godden: Where's John's Porridge Bowl?

Here's a strange and bewitching thing. Marny Godden's succession of unsettling characters are all ostensibly motivated by the search for a mystical wooden porridge bowl. A Gandalf-like sage opens the show ruing its loss, and interrogating the audience on its whereabouts. By the end of the show the bowl is back, but I'm not sure that matters. Instead the pleasures on offer here arise from the succession of heavily-costumed characters that reveal a performer bent on comically destabilising an audience enjoying the confusion.

Thus a shouty policeman spends a lot of time ensuring the crowd knows what his name is. A northern dog is obsessed with keeping it real. A single-toothed character recounts what it's like to live with such problematic dentistry. There is a lot of audience participation, including a game of musical statues and a very funny session of word association. This is all pleasingly off-kilter, in one of those shows where the pleasure is in trying to keep up with what's going on.

Godden is a manic performer, grinning to the audience through the gap-filled screen she unnecessarily hides behind for costume changes. That all this doesn't quite sing as it might is down to the audience not quite being given enough clues as to how to make sense of it all. But there's joy in a gig where the performer's vision is pure, even if it feels like some of these ideas are still yet to be fully crystallised. Give her time.