Boxman

If Edinburgh University ever hosts a lecture on applying dramaturgy to solo performances, Boxman should pitch a tent to get first in line. We were blessed with astonishing one-man shows at last year’s Fringe with Mark Weinman’s mesmerising Captain Amazing and Trygve Wakenshaw’s sweetly surreal Squidboy. Here, Ruaraidh Murray only serves to elevate those performers further.

Murray plays Brian, a paranoid, self-confessed loser who can only make it a few steps from his front door before freaking out about whether he locked the windows and turned off the oven. Liberation comes in the shape of ASDA check-out girl Mandy, and with her the hope that Brian can dismiss his alter-ego Boxman: that annoying little voice in his head that says he can never be normal.

Even if the title of this show intrigues you, there are no answers on the other side. While it tries to deal with questions of loneliness and despondency, this hour of solo theatre is so stretched out that it feels as if it's been fed through a mangle. Clumsy direct address, recurring rainy day songs and bland self-narration gut all coherence from the story. Murray himself is likeable on stage, but his character is entirely unsympathetic, ordinary, false and poorly observed. One sequence which throws in casual sex, drug use and alcoholism is completely jumbled and arbitrary, fuelling the protagonist’s implausibility. With any luck, the show will fit back into the box it came in – to be sealed with a full roll of duct tape.