"There's a fundamental difference between weird and f**ked-up. You are born weird, you get f**ked up. I’m f**ked up." So says Victor, the messed up anti-hero at the heart of House, an energetic one-hander by Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor.

Set up as a confessional between Victor and the audience, he sits alone on an empty black stage with a naked light bulb above his head and lets rip, telling a tragi-comic tale of how life has contrived to totally screw him up.

At one point he does bound off the stage and into the audience. This breaking through the fourth wall is unnerving when it's a stand-up on a pestering foray into the crowd but it's down right menacing when you have the frantic Victor, winding up a polite theatre crowd by playing with matches. It's moments like this, as well as periodically plunging the audience into darkness, with a click of his fingers, that reminds you who is in control and just how relieved you are when Victor confines himself to the stage.

Unstable he might be, but Victor's memoirs make for great theatre. Ridiculously self aware with a superiority/inferiority complex, he introduces you to his authoritarian mother and depressive father and regales the audience with anecdotes of how the other addicts lost their way into his group therapy session. Top of the misfits list is weird Stu, the crap kleptomaniac, who only steals the bizarre and irrelevant and hippy Jo the over weaning, sandal-wearing group co-ordinator.

Other vile and incredible characters that have pushed Victor to the brink of insanity include the sycophantic Andrew, a work colleague Victor can't stand and his wife, Mary Ann, who despises him. But it is his 12 years of servitude at Millards, a sceptic tank cleaning business, that really send him off the rails. This lowly travail fuels his obsession with his house, which he proudly transforms into a glistening show-home in order to impress his boss - who, in a sick twist of fate, forces him out of it by canoodling and falling for the duplicitous Mary Ann.

House is a dark, comic production which takes the audience on a frenetic whirlwind; flagging up the sign posts that sent Victor round the bend. It's peppered with smatterings of Portnoy’s Complaint and elements of Stephen Berkoff’s Kvetch: in Victor's insecure, paranoid stream of verbal diarreahea and total solipsism.

The prodigiously talented Trevor White is a tour de force as Victor. In the hands of a lesser actor this tragi-comic character could have been glib and shallow but instead White produces an amazingly rich performance; he sings, he shouts, he sighs and has the kind of facial expression and capacity to convey emotion through grimaces that only Jim Carrey could match.

Watching White is a master-class in acting but however astounding his performance, the play loses something in translation. Made for a Canadian audience and first performed in Toronto in 1991, House was exceptionally well received in its home country, but while it is entertaining and the writing smart and acerbic, it is hardly cutting edge and seemed slightly dated, hackneyed and made for audiences with knowledge of cultural references that just don't mean much to a Brit.

If it weren't for Trevor White's energy and charisma, House, on the whole would be condemned. He is the hot ticket in this production and casting directors should be queuing up to catch him.

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