BWW Reviews: TITLE AND DEED, The Print Room, January 16 2015

We don't really know who this man is. He has shuffled into our lives, just a small bag at his side and his words to talk with (and about). We learn not where he is from, but merely that he is not "from here". We start conventional narratives, but they soon stop and we're left with the verbal equivalent of a scratched photograph. The man seems both lonely and gregarious, a man who enjoys company, but has none - it's a life that goes in and out of focus.

Will Eno's Title and Deed (continuing at The Print Room until 7 February) is a one man play winningly performed by Irish actor Conor Lovett. At times laugh out loud funny, at times mournfully sad, Eno has created a character with something of John Kennedy Toole's Ignatius J Reilly and Craggy Island's Father Dougal McGuire about him, an innocent without the wisdom to know it, but who, like the famous stopped clock, is right often enough to say profound things about how we rub along on the planet third from the sun.

At 70 minutes all-through, the monologue does not, as our man confesses as his purpose early on, "Save us all". But this man, who seems at times one of us and at others an alien from a different world, does worm his way into our heads, demanding that we enter his strange, contingent, untethered world. Once there, we find that our own lives of to-do lists, appointments and obligations are as random as his world shorn of them. So would it really matter if we just arrived at an airport as a man who is "not from here" and got on with it? We don't get an answer, but we do get the question - and that's plenty for now.

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