The challenges of childhood and adolescence come thick and fast, and when finding your place in the world seems impossible, disappearing inside your own head can feel like the best option. Performer Kévin Coquelard as the eponymous Birdboy does just that. Playing on his internal radio are songs about loneliness, inspirational speakers, David Attenborough, Nyan Cat and a variety of self-made lists.

At first, Coquelard’s humorous lip-synching keeps the mood light. As does his athletic manoeuvring through and around a beat-up car. But choreographer Emma Martin is no stranger to emotional resonance, and when the word ‘weirdo’ flashes up alongside a shadow puppet of our young hero, and harsh words about his lack of friends are spoken, a palpable empathy emanates from the audience.

Tapping into the fragility of youth, Birdboy is also a beautiful tribute to the imagination and spark of those deemed outsiders, but who are perfect just the way they are.

On the stage sits a rusted old car that looks like a life-sized toy. Dancer Kévin Coquelard races in, on and around it, while perfectly lip-syncing the soundtrack of a frenetic radio. The car is also a toy chest, in which the dancer finds colourful socks and plastic jellyfish to release on stage. It is a magical hut, like those children build to shelter their endless fantasies, a refuge from the rest of the world, a friend with a beating heart and two headlights for eyes. Watching Birdboy rekindles that childhood feeling of being surrounded by magic and the limitless possibilities of imagination.

But the bird is not yet in flight: he is still underwater, surrounded by strange silent jellyfish floating around him. As an ode to children who don’t fit in, the piece definitely leaves a strong melancholic aftertaste to the joyful mess.

He flew too close to the sun, legend has it, with wings of feathers and wax. It was hubris that caused his fall, for no boy can be a bird. Unless the boy doesn’t quite fit the bill, that is. Which is where choreographer Emma Martin comes in with her Birdboy, who is no Icarus.

Performed by Kévin Coquelard with acrobatic curiosity, Birdboy is that lost kid in school, kicking about on the outskirts of society. With his odd socks, and even odder impersonations, he’s clearly inhabiting a world of his own. Where after every fall, comes another flight. Watching Coquelard soar and dive through the whole gamut of human experience—from fantasy to fear, isolation to, well, isolation—we can’t help but feel he’s that kid who fell through the cracks. That Martin makes us notice him sets Birdboy apart as a dance worthy of our attention.

A tired old car sits centre-stage as birdsong skims the air. As the headlights flicker to life, to a manic radio montage of music and internet-zeitgeist soundbites (superbly mixed by Dunk Murphy), a boy’s head pops up in the window.

The boy, performed with liquid abandon by Kévin Coquelard, goes tumbling involuntarily in and out of the car, dancing, lip-syncing to the words while his limbs pull him from one pratfall to another.

We’re somewhere in the boy’s mind, his private diaries of bullying and alienation played back to us via recordings, his dreams re-enacted through imaginatively staged shadow puppetry. Floating apparitions soon cut through these scenes with eery menace and threaten to carry his buried sorrows to the surface.

All these moments are embodied with rare clarity in Emma Martin’s Birdboy, resulting in an elegantly punk show for young people which never patronises its audience.