Theatre                                                             The Bird                                                            16 February

Who could describe the myriad raw, comic, multiform, dark and effulgent elements that Icarus Falling sends into spiralling motion before its small audience?

This is physical theatre melded with Greek mythology — a re-imagining of Icarus and his incarcerated heart, living alone in a prison-tower with his abusive arsehole father, Daedalus. Capable of only crude, barbarous creations with his hooked, arthritic claws, Daedalus is more animal than the Minotaur that stalks the labyrinth below.

Yet the act’s structure is far too Protean to be subsumed entirely into myth. Whilst initially grounding itself in ancient story, it soon launches off into a space of its own, becoming a richly figured inter-coiling with a man’s open rib-cage; a confrontation lashed with meta-irony; spoken poetry sprung with comedy, and ambushed by — surprise! —ninjas.

It is also explosions and playing video-games in your room for three days and not changing your clothes for three days and other clichés and shit.

What it expresses is the twistedness of life, the agonizing and obsessive contortions of love and the awful residue of all-too-human error. It’s about depression, suicide and the naive violence of prescribed gender play. It’s about the interminable fall of humanity through its own restless past and rearing future.

The images that performer Scott Wings weaves before us are so visceral as to almost sear their colour and form against the red-lit gloom of the Blue Room’s tiny hollow. We see the face of Icarus’ lover that he knits out of tower cobwebs; we look down with him as, helpless, he watches tiny figures perish in the maze below. We see suicide in a jar of lightning.

Then we watch him tenderly address the sky—apologising for all the missiles that made her mascara run, and for all the A-Bombs that gave her such a god-awful fake tan.

It’s difficult to talk about physical theatre and performance poetry without making it sound uncomfortably wanky; pretension clings to the reputation of both genres. Yet Wings somehow manages to creep under our prejudicial skin by constantly undercutting his performance with bathos, playfulness and wit. I laughed with unguarded delight at his portrayal of Minos as a languid, cell-phone savvy dandy, and at his flyaway references to Zelda (“you fuckers!”) and Bon Jovi.

This is, in other words, theatre that knows itself; the kind of intimate knowing that brings into the open its own attendant pains and weariness and piquantly revolving comedy of the absurd.

Little wonder the show had a sell-out premiere season at Edinburgh Fringe last year; it is an utterly transfixing hour. Contrary to my pre-show predictions: I recommend.

The final performance of Icarus Falling will be Tuesday, February 17. Find out more here.