Cormac wants G-strings strewn across his coffin, a male stripper spraying the crowd with holy water, and Timbaland’s ‘Apologize’ playing on exit when the day of his funeral arrives. Which, in fact it already has. He’s haunting a canal-side café looking back on his 25 years of life, mostly the years before chemotherapy robbed him of his hair and physique. There’s also a strange voice emanating from somewhere above him, which turns out to be that of the ex he could never quite mould into his ideal shape. 

In part a heart-on-sleeve tribute to Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, this is a one-man dark comedy about Catholicism, masculinity, and the ways human beings project impossible fantasies onto each other. It’s an interesting tack to give us a protagonist who is, in fundamental respects, pretty unlikeable, even though his circumstances would seem to elicit pity. Then again, Cormac’s unreconstructed, mummy’s-boy narcissism is at times so bald that you begin to wonder what lesson we are supposed to be deriving from his comeuppance. 

Ironically for a show about purgatory, Beyond Krapp feels a wee bit trapped itself, between the utterly bleak existential comedy of Beckett and a life-affirming slice of naturalism about the foibles of human relations. It doesn’t do either to perfection but it has flashes of real beauty and poignance. 

Beyond Krapp, Pleasance Courtyard, until 26 August, 1.45pm; main picture: Lacuna Photography.