The Bear is a series of very short – only a few minutes each – scenes that together form the twisty story of a portion of Angela Clerkin’s life. There were only three people on stage when I went to see it: Clerkin (who plays herself), Guy Dartnell (who plays every character that’s not Clerkin - there are at least nine of them) and the B.S.L. interpreter.

Each scene picks up one or more themes which run through the play and knits them into the fabric of the story. The play deals with Northern Ireland/Christianity/soldiers/P.T.S.D./violence/anger/mental health, and bearskins/people being bears/people being attacked by bears/bears in general, but also manages to fit in mentions of winning, losing and Clerkin’s lesbianism, all in a dark, noirish modern-day London.

Most of the way through the bear is referred to as if it’s a real bear. Clerkin cites the last recorded sighting of a bear loose in London as 1980 (I checked her source www.beastwatch.co.uk ; it seems kosher) and at least three of the characters have ‘seen’ it. But about three quarters of the way in, she sings a song about fighting (“Walk away!”), her aunt dies (“We sat together, me and the fur coat, watching her”) and she meets the bear in her flat. They fight (“It was exhilarating!”), then live together amicably for a few days, then she goes back to work. The unreality of these events makes the bear metaphor clearer, almost obvious, and ties up most of the ends neatly.

Sometimes, I wasn’t sure whether I was meant to be laughing or not. I didn’t know whether the jokes were falling flat or whether they weren’t jokes at all, which made me uncomfortable. Clerkin shoe-horns in some Irish dancing, and at one point, Dartnell (at the time it’s unclear who he’s playing) snarls a bizarre song detailing five gory ursine attacks which are intercut with a chorus in which he denies any part in them. When one of the lines (“I’m an angel”) is repeated later on by Attwood, it becomes clear that Dartnell was being Attwood being a bear. This often happens: a phrase is repeated in another scene by a different character. It’s wonderfully confusing.

I could say that The Bear is a play about people in fragile mental states after The Troubles, but equally, it’s about bears.