A man lives in a city. His name is Wiley. Surrounded by the daily sonic barrage of metropolitan blips and bleeps, a grind of urban clatter animated and substantiated by performer/live sound operator Chris Branch, Wiley blags his way through his days, working for a company so saturated by buzzwords and taglines he no longer knows what he is doing, dodging in and out of the flowing tide of meaningless scraps of paper that grant him his access to the city. Entry docks for people, exit docks for people, different ones for objects, drink tabs – folded and scribbled on with formulaic precision.

Close to drowning in this paper tide, Wiley finds one scrap to hold on to and bring him back to the surface – a receipt. ‘Choose something and go for it,’ a deurbanised, hopeful, chicken-tending comrade tells him. He does. His mission: to find the owner of the receipt; to find out who it was that bought that drink at a barspace-bar somewhere in the city.

Built up by the performers’ direct relationship with the audience, the immediate effect of Branch’s live sound operation on the progression of Adamsdale’s/Wiley’s quest, and by the comically quirky and seemingly spontaneous exchanges between these two chaps (a boyish banter that tells a story of many shared beers), this tale is very much one of our present times. The match is an excellent one.

The Receipt is an urgent and vital performance and a tale that needs to be told, lest we are drowning and we don’t even realise it: an urban fable of human spirit triumphing over the dehumanising barrage of our daily lives; a quest for our times.