Her bare back gleaming in the oddly coloured light, a figure stirs to life with feint scratches and gasps. She is squatting on a raised platform at the far right of the stage. Her sounds are unnaturally amplified, so that every breath and click of her tongue is audible. She seems to be about to vomit, or else swallowing blood. Three walls loom vertiginously above her like an expressionist painting. 
      When she finally turns her face, a stream of blood runs in a line from one nostril into the bright red of her lips. She introduces herself in an unexpectedly low and reverberating voice, "I'm Jimmy. I'm a homosexual hairdresser". Jimmy moves slowly, like a mime artist. He places his arms into a jacket obviously tailored for someone else, it hangs loosely, reaching almost to his knees. He looks blankly but expectantly into the audience, pauses and at last begins to speak.
      'I came into existence in 1950, in a hair salon in the dream of a distinguished American General.' In that dream Jimmy fell in love with a beautiful blond soldier, Mitchell. But just at the moment that Mitchell stooped to kiss him - 'it was as if the tubes of my eyes were reaching to the tubes of his eyes' - the general's dream ends. Abandoned, suspended at the height of expectation, Jimmy and his beloved never quite touch. 'Mitchell, do you exist somewhere in the dream space?' Jimmy is left hovering in the limbo of his imagination. 
      Jimmy is the pained and delicate creation of actor and play-write Marie Brassard, the principal of several bizarre characters she morphs between in this solo meditation on memory, imagination, and love. While others' dreams are usually (notoriously) more interesting for themselves than for their listeners, Brassard's uncanny and exact sense of character rivets attention to a script that is otherwise a little too long. Her turns of phrase often have the surprising literalness of a child. With an emphasis on the authenticity of the imagined moment, sometimes veering on hard-line idealism, her preoccupations are moreover reminiscent of Borges. (Indeed, certain passages from Borges might almost be the premise of the play, e.g. 'we can postulate, in the mind of an individual, or of two individuals who do not know each other, two identical moments... the same moment… To deny temporal succession, to deny the self, to deny the astronomical universe, are measures of apparent despair and secret consolation'.) The play also captures something of Beckett's absurdist tragicomedy Waiting for Godot.
      Brassard's monologue is imbued with a sense both of optimism and of weariness. Jimmy is charmingly inventive ('maybe if I think real hard about something, a dreamer with no imagination could dream what I imagine'), and yet desperately reconciled ('If you're dreamers, good on you. If you're dreamed, good luck!'). Most of all, he is perceptibly, disarmingly, sincere; an openness which seems to be in spite of himself. He has the manner of one sentenced to endless confession before a judge who already knows the facts. Often he cannot bear to look us in the eyes, but when he turns away his face is still reflected back to us by a mirror. All this prompts the thought that transparency might be inherent in the nature of the dreamed - what after all would it be for an imagined character to have hidden depths? 
      But Jimmy does have his very own imagination, running free from his dreamer's. The problem is rather that his material circumstances are not in his control. Jimmy is stuck in the form of a hermaphrodite in the toilet of an aeroplane, where he was last dreamed of by an actress, whom he repeatedly wills to dream him again into contact with his beloved. There is an inevitable and tragic mis-fit between his body (his clothes, his voice, his actions) and his soul. Unexpressed and un-requited, his very turns of phrase jar awkwardly with the depths of his feeling, his words inadequate vessels for his pain. This suggestive and improbable love story is more than anything else an affecting call for us to listen to our dreams.
Naomi Goulder