What kind of brain thinks up this stuff? Relic emerged from somewhere within the fevered brain of Euripides Laskaridis. He appears as a kind of tailor’s dummy with distended padding, like some tumorous transvestite poodle. He inhabits a room as banal as it is surreal: there are lamps, a pot plant, an inflatable globe. The floor amplifies the clack of his heels, light switches detonate as he flicks them. He dons a wig, gown and pearls to become a compere, mouthing nonsense. He bursts through tinsel like a cabaret act. In burlesque bikini, with 70s moustache and hairstyle, he spanks a gym ball. He sits on a statue while a sponge dribbles suggestively, like pee. He is the most ridiculous of impossible bodies, and so, on some level, the most tragic of Frankensteinian monstrosities. Your own brain keeps thinking what the fuck? and then: what the hell, just go with it. It’s worth it.

Can a bust be used as a loo? Can a speech be delivered in an invented language and still be understood? In Euripides Laskaridis’ Relic, the answer is yes. At the beginning one feels as if peeping into a neighbour’s living room. We are smoothly drawn into a room with cables and switches all over the place and objects collected from the trash and recycled. Laskaridis, disguised as an outsize caricature of a humanoid sculpture, inhabits the room, which becomes his stage, leading us through a neatly knitted set of vaudeville sketches.

Laskaridis masters simple but effective movements and a colourful range of vocal sounds. His sharp imagination messes with our expectations on any familiar gesture or attitude he undertakes, transforming them into dreamlike connections. Again and again, each amusing twist makes one feel more and more at home in Relic’s bizarre atmosphere.