What I Heard About the World

This winsome storytelling piece from Sheffield's Third Angel and Portugal's Mala Voadora is a playful exploration of the limits of human comprehension in an age where science and communication have advanced to the extent that it is possible to 'know' almost everything about our world.

Sprawled around a ramshackle bedsit set like a bunch of ageing students, performer/devisors Jorge Andrade, Alexander Kelly and Chris Thorpe weave together a playful tapestry of factlets and stories - about Israeli radio stations, Japanese zoos, Korean haircuts, Greenland prison sentence, vanishing islands, a radio channel that plays only silence - into a mischievous patchwork that almost (but not quite) resembles a narrative.

And yet their words do not dispel the bedsit: it's a beautiful dance of facts, but you cannot simply describe the world. This point is made best at the climax, a sensitive but quirky demonstration of the inability of language and statistics to convey the reality of genocide.

Smart and likeable, this whimsical show was nonetheless a little too short and sweet for me, happy to acknowledge the limits of comprehension rather than heroically attempt to defy them.