A beast of burden

According to their publicity, the Belfast-based Kabosh theatre company exists to "continually question the notion of the stage and to provide audiences with new stimuli and new questions".

Taking a crowd of punters and cramming them into a small wooden house pitched in the middle of the Lyric's rehearsal room certainly ticks all the boxes. New questions couldn't help presenting themselves to me.

Questions like, why are the sight-lines so bad? Is the impression that this is a witty, energetic and sinister production of Ionesco's absurdist parable an accurate one, or a delusion produced by the fact you can barely see what's happening on the stage from a seat only four rows back? Should people who can only see 40 per cent of the action be entitled to a refund of 60 per cent of the ticket price?

Happily, I can tell you that when they were standing up and not hidden from my view, Karl Wallace's ensemble cast made good work of Ionesco's monstrous black comedy; that their deliberations over whether their fellow townsfolk were being transformed into green-skinned pachyderms were conveyed with Goonish
gusto. Whether they maintained these standards in the long stretches of the play that they spent seated, I'm unable to confirm.

I'll offer my impressions. Karl O'Neill is a hoot as the town logician: a scene in which he uses a blackboard full of equations to deduce the number and species of rhinoceroses present is a delight.

Sonya Kelly has a gift for the ridiculous - and not only because she has been blessed with eyes as saucer-like as Marty Feldman's. Joanne Donelly is amusingly slack-jawed as a waitress forced to dodge a charging beast at a
pavement café. Sean Duggan brings a creditable note of panic to the role of the last man in town not to undergo transmogrification.

So, if you're willing to behave like a rhinoceros yourself, and barge past fellow theatregoers to reach the front row, then you'll like what you see. More timid audience members will have to satisfy themselves with a production that is an excellent piece of live radio, but as theatre, an absurd failure.

Until 26 March. Information: 08700 500 511.