Daniel McIvor's one-man show focuses on the conflicting impulses to relish life and embrace despair, reports Mark Fisher.

I DON'T know if the Tron and the Traverse are deliberately programming charismatic North American one-man shows every summer, but the arrival of Daniel MacIvor -in Edinburgh during the Fringe and in Glasgow soon after - will comfortably fill the slot created during the past few years by Mark Pinkosh of Starving Artists, who this year is branching out with a two-hander at the same venues.

Toronto-based MacIvor is in Britain for a lengthy tour of Here Lies Henry, a monologue put together with director Daniel Brooks under the Da Da Kamera banner. Glasgow theatregoers will remember the team from the Canadian-themed Mayfest of 1993 when they played The Arches. The show they brought, House, a ``stand-up-sit-down comedy'', was along much the same lines as the latest show, Here Lies Henry - comedy with an edge, tragedy with laughs, with the endearing MacIvor charming the socks off you one moment, chilling you to the bone the next.

He might begin Here Lies Henry like a club comic, his opening routine a cleverly observed fidgety fumble, all hesitation and nervous smiles, but as the monologue progresses, he draws us into darker waters that only theatre can get near.

I saw the show a few months ago in Toronto and met up with the two Daniels while I was there. ``The whole thing started as being a one-man show that was going to be a twisted adaptation of Jane Eyre,'' says MacIvor, somewhat implausibly for a play that tells the modern-day life story of one Henry Tom Gallery, a man giving to fabrication and dedicated to the superficial, which evolves into a Beckett-like meditation on the meaning of life with end-of-millennium undertones. But with devised theatre, the most slender of influences can grow into the most substantial of material, and a Charlotte Bronte novel - an unread one at that - is as good a starting point as any.

``I couldn't get through the book,'' the 33-year-old MacIvor admits. ``I couldn't get through it at university either. Then I watched the movie with Orson Welles and I couldn't get past the scene where she's left to stand on a stool and the guy says, `This little girl is a liar!'.''

That, however, was enough to establish the theme of deception in MacIvor's mind, a theme equally attractive to Brooks whose own contribution to the first day's rehearsal was the phrase, ``This is the way of being human''.

Then the improvisation began. From here on in it was a joint creation; MacIvor, an acclaimed dramatist in his own right, contributing most of the words, while Brooks shaped, pushed, and moulded the material as it emerged.

``We don't like to get trapped by traditional boundaries, from talking about the meaning of a play, to the script, to what is a lighting-board operator,'' says the 35-year-old Brooks. ``I'm not even really a director - he contributes to the direction as well.''

He added: ``Certainly he's the main writer, but in terms of creating a play, in terms of structuring, in terms of what it's about, in terms of some key decisions and ideas, it's collaborative. We take a holistic approach to what the performer is. A performer is a mind, body, and voice surrounded by space, and that space can have shape, colour, and texture.''

This kind of blurring of boundaries can easily lead to a formless style of theatre in which none of the contributors gets space to shine. Not so here, however, in a production that is as linguistically rich as it is technically precise. MacIvor's performance is physical, but not ostentatious - his material clever, funny, and well crafted. The staging could not be more simple - one man on an empty stage - but it is a deceptive simplicity, distinguished by a sound and lighting design that is the last word in precision.

When I mention Samuel Beckett to MacIvor, he neither denies nor confirms the influence, but, tellingly, pulls out a cutting from the Times Literary Supplement with a quote from the great Irish playwright. ``Life would be unimaginably worse if we had to imagine it without death,'' he reads, emphasising his own interest in the conflicting impulses to relish life and to embrace despair.

``Last year I spent some time with some students who were about 21,'' he says. ``I was struck by how helpless it all seemed. When we started this I was really depressed. I was thinking about endings and the end of things, everything was ending for me. The millennium is another ending. We are at a turning point in our lives, in our early to mid-30s, and it just so happens to be that we're speaking for the feeling in the world too.''

But amid the end-of-millennium gloom, there's also the laughter of a witty live performance. Here Lies Henry has mutated from its initial sinister form to a more overtly comic version and back to its current incarnation as a mixture of the two. It's a style MacIvor thinks goes down well in Scotland, where the narrative tradition is still strong.

``There's a history of stand-up in England that is different to American stand-up which is very much character-based, long extended stories,'' he says. ``A lot of people who saw me in England immediately thought I was doing that, but it isn't quite that. Playing in Scotland was a very different experience. Somehow in Scotland people understood more easily what was going on. Ultimately it's not stand-up, because it requires a commitment from the audience that stand-up doesn't require.''

n.Here Lies Henry is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, August 20-31; and at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, September 3-8