Story Of A Rabbit, Brighton Dome Pavilion, Tues May 20 – Sat May 24

4:51pm Friday 11th April 2008

My interview with Shon Dale-Jones, the performer behind Story Of A Rabbit, gets off to a surreal start when he insists on being interviewed as his alter-ego Hugh Hughes.

Many audiences think he is Hugh, says the 39-year-old, and he prefers to talk about the show as the "emergent Welsh multimedia artist" rather than as Shon, actor and cofounder of theatre company Hoipolloi.

Partly inspired by the films of Luis Buñuel, particularly Buñuel's suggestion that "fantasy and reality are equally personal and equally felt, and therefore their confusion is a matter of relative importance", Hugh is essentially a wide-eyed, naive and unselfconscious version of Shon.

His shows, which also include the acclaimed Floating, meld Shon's own experiences with Hugh's flights of fancy to create mesmerisingly strange tales.

Story Of A Rabbit was inspired by the death of Shon's father in 2001. In real life he was a shopkeeper, but in Hugh's touching reimagining, he is an amateur acrobat who dies while performing his greatest stunt yet.

This is contrasted with Shon's (or possibly Hugh's) first experience of bereavement, which occurred when, in 1995, his neighbour's rabbit died while in his care.

Shon briefly pauses to go and "fetch" Hugh, adopts a slightly spacey, earnest tone and explains: "When my father died, I really did remember thinking about this episode when I lost my neighbour's rabbit. It was the only other dead body I'd ever seen and I began thinking more about the nature of death.

"You're hopping and running around one minute and the next, you're not.

"I found it surprisingly easy to write - there was so much to say. It was such a big experience. It was so disorientating and I felt like it required a kind of understanding, so writing it was a wonderful thing."

It sounds far removed from the whimsy of Floating, in which the island of Anglesea drifts away from the rest of Wales - a metaphor for the upheaval of leaving a hometown.

"I'm still working with some fantastical elements in this show but I suppose it's quite a different tone," Hughes agrees. "Every now and then it becomes serious and profound. But it's a joyous piece. It's celebratory - it's not too morose or morbid.

"This is how it is. We have to live alongside death."

Incorporating video, PowerPoint and live music, Hughes says his performance style is hard to pigeonhole.

"Some people have called it multimedia, some people would call it theatre, some people call it comedy - it doesn't matter to me what people call it. What matters to me is that I connect to an audience. It's about trying to share this powerful experience through the telling of a story."

• Times vary. Tickets £12.50. Call 01273 709709.

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