THEATRE Still Floating

Anyone familiar with the work of playwright/performer Shôn Dale-jones will recognise the disarming mix of compassion, comedy, unease and anger in his latest show – and they will certainly recognise whole chunks of material.

Still Floating is a postbrexit remix of Floating, the first outing for his alter ego Hugh Hughes, the loveable “emerging artist from Wales”, a whimsical fable in which the island of Anglesey becomes untethered from mainland Wales and sails around the Atlantic with its inhabitants making the best of their accidental uncoupling. Some embrace their newfound independence but life is tough on a drifting island with no solid connection to the rest of the world. Who knows how Theatre Royal Plymouth (“a theatre in Plymouth”, says Dale-jones in the modest mansplaining style of Hughes) spotted a Brexit metaphor in that.

But although much of Dale-jones’s work is inspired by our relationship with the past, a simple restaging of Floating doesn’t float his boat. And so Still Floating oscillates between some of the greatest hits of its predecessor – the cardboard cut-out props, the rise and fall of schoolteacher leader Mr Morgan, Dale-jones in his modesty towel and then layering on the jumpers in an airless room (that’s dedication to his art) – and a new story set in the present day. Here he travels home to Anglesey to see his ailing mum, flirt with a local housing campaign and reconnect with his forlorn childhood friend Dylan, who he describes beautifully in a microcosmic example of his beguiling writing style.

As ever, while the audience is laughing gently at the whimsy, sniggering at Hughes’ haplessness and feeling as cosy as the performer in his jumpers, there is a more trenchant point being made by Dale-jones who is carefully and cleverly tying all the seemingly disparate strands together to coalesce around the human need for connection – to our home, to our past, to each other.