Daydreams Are Always Better

My legendary dislike of scripts - legendary in the sense of an exaggerated truth rather than something anyone knows, or cares, about - is based in the certainty that British theatre has been retarded by Shakespeare, and that words have been the default foundation of UK performance.

This certainty looks shakier when I check the cast biographies of Smith Dance Theatre's Agnes and Walter.Artistic director Neil Paris was part of Fabulous Beast, Michael Keegan Dolan's Irish dance powerhouse, while the performers include Dan Carnam, out of DV8, Fabulous Beast and Punchdrunk.The last twenty years has seen the rise of British Dance Theatre, where choreography has colluded with the script, integrating words and dance like the gifted child of primary school music and movement sessions.

My memories of music and movement, perhaps uniquely, involve my mother turning up and teaching my class to skip to Aiken Drum. Agnes and Walter, fortunately, is less of a Freudian minefield. Inspired by the film of Walter Mitty - one of my mother's favourites, Oedipus spotters - it casts light on the most effective way to preserve a long-term relationship: ignore it and dive into rich fantasy lives.

For Paris, Agnes and Walter is the culmination of an ambition to do something with Mitty: but while the original story led to the name become a synonym for a hopeless dreamer, Paris sees him as an archetype of the artist. Daydreaming may seem "a negative activity," he says. "But this is a vital ingredient of aspiration and development."

Rescuing Walter from his portrayal as a hopeless waster, Paris' vision is preoccupied with what lies beneath appearances, and the potential of the mind. Cool critic Donald Hutera saw an early version and was impressed by the way that the story became "a springboard from which to fashion a tender, quirky and wordless look at aspirations and disappointments."

The cast, increasingly rarely for The Fringe, spans generations as much as it acts as a record of the companies who wrested British theatre from the clammy dead hand of the script: when Hutera points out that the action is wordless, he is accounting for the reason behind its potential success in Edinburgh. In an international festival city, the language barrier is always a good thing to crack.