CROAK CROAK CROAK

Bristol New Vic

What do you do when you lose your voice? Peter Tinniswood, one of the masters of English comic writing, lost his in a laryngotomy to excise cancer. Yet he claims that in losing one voice, he has found another. And it is certainly true that Croak Croak Croak - a combination of two new one-act plays - revels in a bleaker, more absurdist style. Those who know Tinniswood from the offbeat humour of the Brigadier or the askance comedy of Uncle Mort will be somewhat taken aback by his new pieces, The Scan and The Voice Boxer, on the subject of losing one's voice forever.

The Scan opens with a nurse (Annette Badland) talking to her scanner: her friend and - perhaps - her lover (judging by the passionate kisses which she bestows upon it). This lovefest is interrupted by Shacklock (Derek Griffiths), a man who wants to undergo a scan in order "to get rid of these words. I don't know where they come from." Driven by the fear that, like his father before him, cancer will leave him voiceless and croaking, he is a compulsive talker: "I owe it to my voice. I might lose it someday." As the sophisticated scanner - which can analyse thoughts and emotions as well as bones and muscles - does its work, Shacklock and the nurse are drawn into a surrealistic world of fears, fantasies and memories, leaving them clinging together in the scanner's embrace.

The Scan is, in essence, an exploration of fear: fear of loneliness, fear of enclosure and fear of illness, particularly when it has afflicted a near relative. The fear that means that a tingling foot is suddenly transformed from 'trapped nerve' to 'worrying symptom' if a sibling has been diagnosed with MS. The fear that prevents so many men from visiting their doctor about the 'problem with their waterworks' until its too late. And the fear of being alone in a big, anonymous city, where your best friend is a medical scanner.

Meanwhile The Voice Boxer is a surrealistic piece set in the hospital room of a man who has just had his larynx removed. As he is pampered and patronised by his landlady (Badland), a striking figure enters (Griffiths). This is the Voice Boxer, the entity which controls our voice, released from the confines of the throat like a genie from a lamp. He revels in his new-found freedom - "I can say what I want. No responsibilities. No restraints." - and in the end, the landlady elopes with the uninhibited, id-like voice.

The play examines not so much the physical voice, as the role which our voice, hidebound by responsibility and inhibition, plays in determining the presentation of the self in everyday life. The fact that Tinniswood uses a device particularly close to his own heart to release the voice within is almost irrelevant in the overall shape of the piece. If there is a message, it is that it is the true, unrestrained voice that succeeds: verity triumphs over artificiality.

Yet neither of these plays are really 'message' pieces. They are bleakly comic trips into the surreal. By a strange coincidence, the name 'Peter Tinniswood' contains all the letters required to make up 'Pinter/Ionesco' - except for one missing 'c'. It is therefore appropriate that the removal of the big C has led ultimately to a new writing style which brings together elements of (you guessed it) Pinter and Ionesco. And in that, Tinniswood really has found a new voice.

TOBY O'CONNOR MORSE

Until 28 October. Box office (0117) 987 7877