IMPROBABLE Theatre by name, improbable theatre by nature. This is the experimental funhouse that spawned 70 Hill Lane, the show with the cocoon of sticky tape that must have done wonders for Sellotape's share value, and Shockheaded Peter, the gleefully scary one with all that high-pitched delirious singing by the Tiger Lilies.

As with Shockheaded Peter in 1998, The Hanging Man is emerging from its chrysalis at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, and being an improvised piece that moves in and out of its story about death, it is yet to become a glorious butterfly. Opening night was April 19, press night April 29, so maybe death takes a long time to warm up.

Directed, designed and scripted by the theatrical triumvirate of Phelim McDermott, Lee Simpson and Julian Crouch, The Hanging Man is a bittersweet tale of an architect, a half-finished cathedral building and a botched suicide attempt in a despairing search for death.

There hangs the shell of a man, architect Edward Braff (Richard Katz), in a noose in the wooden shell of a cathedral even less complete than Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

The company of actors moves among the beams, ropes, pillars and trapdoors, in clothes that could pass as fashionably modern yet old, much like the play and its story. The same story they tell every night, but not exactly the same way each time.

The cast is not credited with character names, so it is always apparent that they - Katz, Lisa Hammond, Nick Haverson, Catherine Marmier, Rachael Spence and Ed Woodall - are actors taking on roles, with room to step out of character to pass comment on the story they are telling and why they are telling it.

Room too, to improvise a guessing game in which various forms of death are enacted and for Haverson and Spence to describe fantasies of death in graphic, spontaneous detail.

The reason for all this fixation with the final curtain is that, in keeping with his life, Braff can't even carry out his suicide successfully. Instead, with the "careful assistance" of Tim Preece's rope's work he is suspended between life and death, his noose too loose to effect his exit. Death, a pocket-sized Puck in the form of Lisa Hammond, refuses to let him shuffle off the mortal coil without learning a lesson or two.

The Hanging Man is more multi-coloured black humour from Improbable that somehow marries the spirit of Samuel Beckett to Liberty X's Just A Little, but like Braff's neck, it does over-stretch itself.

Box office: 0113 2137700

Updated: 11:29 Thursday, May 01, 2003