Underneath the Lintel

A book is mysteriously returned to a provincial library over a century after its due date and a librarian takes up the quest to find an explanation for this. He is catapulted from his small town life, with its Office style rivalries and terrritoriality in the workplace, into this obsession. Criss-crossing the world, the story zigzags through the centuries, as he collects scraps of evidence to gradually solve the mystery.

The journey opens up the slim volume of his life and questions about the nearness of death, missed opportunities for love, our cruelty and inhumanity to one another and the existence of God, but not always in a thoroughly convincing and moving way. Philip O`Sullivan, the anti-hero, tells his story well, even if a few of the lines dissolved in his accent and projected images were obscured by his movements.

The various episodes in the story could have been a little better punctuated, flagged up, particularly the principal one of the story of Ahasuerus and Christ, to compensate for the contrived script. It might have rescued the piece from becoming an endless series of scenes and objects taken from his `Mary Poppins-like` suitcase which, once the principal mystery was solved, became too easy to lose interest in and track of.