As the audience entered the room, Marcia Carr was lurching around the stage repeating the same apocalyptically bleak introduction to her performance.

The adapter and director had the distinct look of a woman in the full throes of madness, and her production did little to dispel this notion.

While Carr's energy and stamina in carrying off a one-woman prose of such passion for over an hour were truly exceptional, the concepts she dealt with were more bewildering than brilliant.

Alice, the cherubic freak she played, staggered through a surreal set of scenarios after waking to find her father dead, her endless wailing masking any realistic prospect of identifying the point of the story.

Despite sporadic moments of dramatic poignancy, her brother's inexplicable pottering in the background and abstract video projections of scenes only served to murky the plot beyond comprehension.