John Moran came to the North Wall trailing some excellent reviews, and I went in high hopes, but ended up shocked by the utter banality of what was presented to us. Moran, a 40-something protégé of Philip Glass, has apparently wowed New York with gigantic multi-media productions of his own ‘operas’. His offering in Oxford was from the newer, small-scale, Moran, featuring himself and his neighbour – a trained gymnast and dancer, none of whose abilities are used here, since she is mainly confined to tottering around the stage saying “I’m not on drugs”, or smiling winsomely in oriental poses.

Moran himself enters alone, sits on the floor and laughs for half a minute. Is something funny? Please let us know! Then he makes much of whether Saori will come on stage. From there we move into a series of autobiographical anecdotes and unconnected sketches. Much of the time Saori seems to be miming to a recorded track, and we hear the opening theme of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which Moran claims he has made himself by recording every single note separately and then editing them together. Are we to believe this? It seems a pretty pointless exercise, but speculation on his various claims – did he really write vast ‘operas’ featuring stars like Uma Thurman? – at least causes the brain to operate as he plunges on (one member of the audience fell asleep!). There is the story of how he pinched a friend’s girlfriend, how the friend committed suicide, and how he wrote a song for the girl, Rebecca. He sings it in a wavering falsetto. There is a faintly amusing scene in which Saori is a McDonald’s employee, but for much of the time Moran, a remarkably uncharismatic figure, is repeating “You freak me out” while she tells him to “shut up.”

It takes a lot of arrogance to cobble together an hour of pretentious, self-regarding, badly presented ideas and call them an entertainment. I don’t like writing a bad review, and have been trying to think of something positive to say. All I can come up with is that this is a unique show. Well, I certainly hope so!