The imagination of a lonely little girl is poignant thing — unless that lonely little girl is basically psychotic.

You laugh, but it is actually quite sad. Madeleine has many of the normal things that little girls have: a My Pretty Pony bicycle, baby fat, a hatred for working on her grandfather’s farm, a debilitating crush on Johnno Boyle O’Connor. She has light fingers when it comes to the second hand shop in town, and a heavy hand when it comes to decapitating chickens — and she has no mum.

Written and performed by Genevieve Hulme-Beaman, we know everything we know because we are told, but not in the usual stand-up, stand-still monologue fashion. Her vocal and physical intensity perfectly captures the inner self-narration of a child who’s not got much in the way of social skills, and yet has enormous dreams. Her behaviour can be seen as comical, and yet underneath it all is a threnody of deep sadness and loss.

That sadness and loss gets lost in the manic pace, in the need to match Madeleine’s – if that’s really her name — antic inability to rest. That it ends badly is no surprise, but its form is; if we had had more experience of the depth of the child’s grief, it might have been even more effective.

Star rating: ★★★★