Sometimes it is hard to find critic-speak to describe a performance. I mean, what do you make of a lone bloke on stage with not so much as a lighting change or noises off to spice up the action? And it lasts an hour. Anything less of a crowdpuller would be hard to find – or so you would think.

Except, well, the result is curious, captivating and hypnotic. Tim Etchells’ latest venture is audacious even by the standards of his Forced Entertainment company. He writes and directs what you and I would call a monologue but he calls “an explanation of the world as if for (or by) a child, a psychotic or a Martian”. The text is a series of fragments that add up to a strangely complete catalogue of human experience. And like That Night follows Day, his earlier magnificent work using children, the many layers, and criss-crossing echoes, work a bizarre alchemy.

Etchells’ hallmark is to string together apparently random and totally untheatrical snippets that demand the attention and complicity of an audience. The text starts off disconcerting and funny, then reveals its quirks and logical connections. Tears are water that drops out of eyes. Fish can breathe if you put them under water, men drink beer, mosquitoes drink blood, men kill mosquitoes. Dragons like to eat villagers or virgins. A factory is a place in China. Etcetera. The register shifts seamlessly from observations to clichés to feelings and back. There is no ranking or change in tone. Without the perspective that emotions and experience provide to make sense of our world, disorientation and absurdity crowd in.

All this rests on the shoulders of one man, New York actor Jim Fletcher. Imperturbable and deadpan, with eyes that pierce every inch of the auditorium, he’s clearly used to his nonplussed audience. Two people walked out after five minutes – was it serendipity that the next line was “some men have sex appeal”? Everyone else lapped up his feat of memory and gravel-voiced delivery: he compelled our attention, down to the minutest tweaking of his eyebrows.

Tel +33 1 43 57 42 14,