CityLife

The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley

The show runs until May 23

QUEER Up North enters its second week with a one-man show from performer/writer/poet/critic/musician and sound artist Chris Goode that cleverly pushes out the boundaries of one-man shows.

Played out on a cut-out, pop-up book style setting of a young boy’s bedroom and using techniques that include soaring film animation plus an original tune-packed soundtrack, Goode tells the story of Shirley, a teenage boy with a girl’s name.

Shirley is a loner but hopelessly in love with the captain of the cross country running team, a lad who rejoices in the name of Subway Darling and who hardly knows of Shirley’s existence. So much, so ordinary.

But one night, a mysterious figure moves into Shirley’s suburban street. It’s Wound Man, a superhero like no other superhero, and he just happens to have a vacancy for a teenage sidekick…

Medieval surgical textbooks

The original Wound Man comes from illustrations in medieval surgical textbooks but Goode’s 21st century version - clanking around in silver posing pouch, with knives and arrows sticking out of him - has the ability to make people brave as he absorbs their pain.

It’s undeniably yet another rites of passage teenage angst tale - with a full measure of repression, coming out and growing up - but viewed from way off to one side, mixing the surreal with the city suburbs and in the process capturing imaginations and winning hearts.

It is frequently extremely bizarre in its wilder flights of fancy, all leavened with sly off-beat humour. As a creation, it’s certainly unlike anything much else you might have seen.

And then there’s Goode himself, who pops up, almost shyly, from the middle of the audience and proceeds to address us directly as he launches into a quite brilliantly pitched performance that somehow remains entirely unassuming.

The whole 90-minute experience is charming, engaging and uplifting.