A small boy called Cuán White has lost his way, and his red boots.  Against a backdrop of Henderson’s subtly changing watercolour paintings of pastel blues and reds and creams, he begins his journey home with nothing but the trust, guidance and promises of strangers.  “Follow the markings and don’t stray and don’t take off your boots,” he’s told.  If only it were as simple as that.

This mystifying piece merges visual and sound art, music, dance and theatre in a splendidly seamless fashion.  At first it resembles something of a jigsaw of isolated parts–a painting projected, a conversation, a dance, and a game of improvisation on a random chosen topic like TV– but something about its charm and its beauty invites us to at least try to piece it all together: ‘Won’t Someone Please Think of The Children’ (its promo video pleads).  And we do, for the two children on stage (in all their opening night innocence and unpredictability!) steal our hearts, and most of our adoring attention.  

Apart from that, there is a woman (Nic Chonaonaigh) being served an eviction notice, a child’s voice recording of the broken leg he endured while making a movie in the carcasses of a ghost estate, a snippet of school teacher’s (Cooper) day in a brimming classroom and a housewife (Sheehy) in black rubber gloves fantasizing about rose petals.  When you put the pieces together, the bigger picture emerges.  This is a play about, for one, the urge to fix things, but perhaps the urge is as far as we’ll get, and (as the closing song goes) the rest is just an impossible dream.

Star rating: ★★★★