Tuesdays at Tesco's

The Substation at the MAC in Belfast is a little wedge-shaped space scrunched into the building to the right of the main entrance hallway. It holds a couple of dozen people, who when I join them are sitting looking through the ceiling-to-floor window at the end of the room, onto the pedestrian walkway outside it.

Gradually you become aware of a neatly dressed middle-aged woman approaching up the pavement area, pushing a shopping trolley through the early-evening people traffic. A voice comes through the speakers in the Substation.

With a jolt of recognition you realise it is the woman outside the window, talking to herself, and beginning to tell a story.

The 'woman' is actually a man, Belfast actor Peter Quigley, and the character is "Pauline", or Paul to the invalid father she visits every Tuesday, for their weekly shop in the local supermarket.

Tuesdays at Tesco's, adapted to a Belfast setting from an original play by French writer Emmanuel Darley, charts the intricacies of the relationship between the transsexual son-daughter and her father, in a fifty-minute monologue transmitted by voice-mic through the Substation window.

It elicits a beautifully controlled and nuanced performance from Peter Quigley, who depicts with great sensitivity the conflicted life that Pauline is forced to lead on a daily basis, not because she is uncertain of her own identity, but because others have such difficulty accepting it.

It is the opposite of a ranting, camped-up piece of acting: the strength of Quigley's interpretation is that he unflashily and unerringly finds the vulnerable human being in Pauline, whose basic goodness of personality is the heart and soul of Darley's writing.

TheatreofplucK is a company which regularly pushes the envelope on issues of sexuality and gender identity, and in Tuesdays at Tescos they've once again succeeded in producing an innovative, thought-provoking show which is very much appointment-to-view theatre.

Terry Blain