The Girl Who Forgot to Sing Badly

The Ark, Dublin

How much can you fit into a single package? Well, if you're Peggy O'Hegarty, a young girl who works with her parents as a professional box-packer, there are no limits: even a grand piano will squeeze into a coffee jar, with some imagination.

The Ark and Theatre Lovett are equally adept at cramming big talent into a modest package with their delightfully effervescent new production. This one-man performance, clocking in at less than an hour, is chock full with playfulness and rich ideas.

It's hard to say whether the expectations of a young audience liberate the imaginations of theatre makers or simply force them to work much harder. Whatever the case, for the performer, director and designers of Tasmanian playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer's new work, its pleasures are realised with uncommon yet discreet effort. Like artists working in miniature, the scale may be small but the details are impressively fastidious.

Emerging from a large wooden crate in leather helmet and flight goggles, Louis Lovett's narrator appears to have been airlifted direct from the 1930s. But as he peels back the sides to Paul O'Mahony's ingenious set, revealing still more containers and contraptions under Sinéad Wallace's twinkling lights, the crate becomes a magic box. Like Lynne Parker's production, it spills surprises with every manoeuvre.

Kruckemeyer has written an adventure fantasy rooted in domestic reality, like a daydream born beneath a dining room table. One day, Peggy's thriving cottage industry comes to an abrupt halt and she ventures out alone to discover a snowy, depopulated city. Thrilled at first, our Omega Girl slips towards a confrontation with a very anti-social villain and a subsequent rescue attempt of her parents, and, it seems, the rest of the world. It's a darting fancy, but one that follows its own whimsical logic without ever seeming chaotic.

That's in no small part due to Lovett's endlessly engaging presence, once again proving not just physically dexterous but mentally athletic. Kruckemeyer's fizzingly comic text has him flitting in and out of the narrative, flagging plot points in advance, telling the story, abandoning it altogether and routinely commenting on it.

"Someone we care about will die," he says, offering immediate consolation, "but there will be a goat."

Never missing a chance to respond to the chuckles, gasps and vocal contributions of his audience with witty adlibs, Lovett makes the experience seem as natural and interactive as a warm hug. Like all fairytales, though, the story has some substance. Parents are separated from their children, kids yearn for independence but fear desertion, and, as Darragh Kelly's benevolent voice-over imparts in another life lesson, good people turn out to be mean people.

"To be left, it is not right," considers an abandoned Peggy, and Lovett stays alive to the peculiarities and possibilities of language.

Indeed, the entire show hums with nimble, exploratory intelligence, captivating attentions and keeping pace with restless imaginations; a story of ingenious packers that always boxes clever.

Runs 'til March 7th