Beguiling madman

Just for one moment, it seems that the actor before the audience is not a human being, but a great humanshaped piece of mould, growing out of a shabby brown armchair that exudes a Pinteresque desolation.

That sense of decaying reality is magnified by Rachel Blues's set, where damp has made its clammy presence felt in the eruptions of mould on the ceiling and the moisture creeping down the walls, while the grimy floor and array of shabby boxes evoke a misery that wrenches the stomach and seeps under the fingernails.

Welcome to the poisonously warped yet strangely fetching world of Ted - one of a vast tradition of insane characters who have attempted to seduce and

beguile a hypothetically sane theatre audience. Ted's mother has died a while ago, while the death of his father has somehow led to his spending time in prison, but - according to Ted, with his solidly slicked-back hair and a terminal slump in the shoulders - little of this has attained the emotional significance of his friendship with an imaginary mongoose.

At a time when Rhys Ifans's winningly hyperactive lunatic is attaining plaudits in Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist at the Donmar, while Timothy West is once more bringing a pained dignity to questions of sanity in King Lear, it is questionable whether London's theatre needs yet another madman to invert our sense of social order. It is a credit to Thea Sharrock's deliberately dank and characteristically confident production that Ted's world exerts a fetid and coercive charm, where his friendly mongoose screams as much about his desire for a simple affectionate intimacy as it does about his terrifyingly unconscious brutality.

Peter Harness's script reeks of magical realism, with a narrative tight rope that simultaneously sustains Ted's credibility and gives him kilometres to hang himself - while Richard Bremmer's hunched, angular performance helps transform the monologue into an engulfing and intermittently disorientating hour of theatre. It breaks little new ground in dramatic terrain, but bodes well for Harness's future as a dramatist who can infect his audience with a pungent alternative vision.

Mongoose