Floating

Published Friday 18 August 2006 at 15:15 by Duska Radosavljevic

Probably the only certain thing about this show is that it inhabits a place between fact and fiction, lecture and performance and water and dry land.

Set in 1982, this is a story about Anglesey floating away all the way up to the north pole and back - an incident that remained unnoticed due to the public eye on the Falklands War. At the same time, having made the decision to leave home, Hugh Hughes is forced to navigate his isle back home instead.

Conceived by Dale-Jones and performed with Jill Norman, this unlikely multi-media story of a rite of passage is rendered with disarming earnestness and dedication, insisting only on a ‘connection’ with its audience. There are elements of hyper-realism, archive and what Hughes himself calls macro-theatre in this thoroughly unpretentious piece. But above all there is a lot of humour and good old imagination - even when we are actually spoon fed the notion of a bridge collapsing rather than being trusted to picture it ourselves.

In its special place between the extremes, this piece about safety and risk takes a plunge into a new territory which turns out to be sheer pleasure.