Pelvic pain performance

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In Panic, actor-devisor Phelim McDermott is frustrated and lonely because the fairer sex won't get naked with him any more. Produced by the inventive troupe Improbable (co-creators of Shockheaded Peter), this new chamber piece could be subtitled "Confessions of a Comic Neurotic".

It's an intriguing hybrid: a kind of sexaholic's stand-up routine, spinning off into ancient myth. With a microphone to hand, McDermott talks us through his wince-inducing case history, anxieties and obsessions. He recounts how he suffered from prostatitis – which made ejaculation painful – and ended up in his Brixton flat with a pile of self-help books and a weird preoccupation with the Greek god Pan.

By now, McDermott is down to his pants. Deadpan, pot-bellied, he describes his prostatisis-related pelvic tension. It is like a deep vibration, he says, as he starts omming like a mystic and madly wobbling his hips. His feet hurt too, he recalls, buckling on to tiptoe. And he morphs into a faun.

At its most inspired, Panic is playful and strangely magical, a dreamlike patchwork of fact and folklore, though McDermott and his three lady-friends have irritating moments. Nevertheless, he is preposterously funny, staggering around with a 6ft phallus made of twigs, lewdly frotting the furniture. And director-designer Julian Crouch creates bewitching visions. Using brown paper and shadow-puppetry, he conjures up a forest teeming with orgiastic nymphs and giant insects – like an iPod rave dreamt up by Bosch. Recommended.

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