Theatre

The show opens with Hugh Hughes personally welcoming each audience member to the theatre. Then, once we’re seated, he offers to make one of us a cup of tea, from an urn on stage. A lot of tea gets drunk when people die, he notes, smiling happily. And it is the gap between Hughes’s remorselessly cheerful persona and his subject matter – the death of his father – that gives his show its power.

It will come as no surprise that Hoipolloi’s ‘Story of a Rabbit’ won a Fringe First at Edinburgh last summer – it’s the kind of free-form performance, ready to interact with the audience, that goes down well there. As a touring show it works just fine, too. Hughes himself has an utterly charming stage presence, though he tends to shade into the irritating. He is forever deconstructing his stagecraft with the eagerness of a child explaining a crayon drawing. ‘Obviously what I was doing there was using both movement and dance to express my frustration at not being able to fit the rigor mortis rabbit into the cardboard box.’

The subject matter is hardly groundbreaking – the death of his father runs parallel with a dead rabbit that Hughes was supposed to be looking after for his neighbours – and the emotional arc simplistic. His conclusion is that ‘life is spectacular’, though the very Welsh usage of that adjective is rather lovely. Without the splendid live music of Hughes’s timid sidekick, Aled Williams, which underpins and lifts so much of the show’s melancholy, it might not work half so well.