I have so much work to do right now. The deadlines, both writerly and library-related, are bleeding out of my eyes. Things are not helped by the fact that I’m re-reading the excellent and uber-subversive Walden. I can’t help but consider the merits of ‘doing a Thoreau’ but figure I should give this respectable career idea a fair shot first. And anyway, it’d probably take a cod-handed chimp like me at least six months just to sand down the timber.

The theme of escape continued last night with a trip to the Tramway Theatre on Glasgow’s south side to witness a performance of Simon Bent’s acclaimed play, The Escapologist.

To be honest, I’m not really sure it deserves the praise it’s received. While not entirely without merit (it makes wonderful use of a minimalistic and richly symbolic set and there are some cool through-the-ceiling entrances by dudes in straitjackets), the play consists of cliche after cliche about the remote relationship between therapist and patient and a far-from-subtle underpinning theme of the modern urbanite’s desire to escape his or her multitude of depressing commitments. The programme even quotes Freud’s “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” cringingly on the first page.

It is all just too literal, I think. A straitjacket is surely a hackneyed symbol of entrapment. I can’t help feeling that the show would have been better as a black comedy no doubt, possibly involving iron lungs like wot I cleverly did back in 2000.

Most reviews of the show make reference to the idea that we all share a desire to escape. Is that what this play, as a cultural artifact, signifies? Are we really all so desperately unhappy and unfulfilled that the desire to escape is constantly present? Do we all feel as though we’re failing to keep up with go-getting society?

I’m reminded of the ‘bird man’ images etched into the rocks during the last days of populated Easter Island – thought by many to be articulations of the islanders’ inability to take flight after their raw materials had been expended on irrational statue-building. One might wax that The Escapologist is a postmodern incarnation of the bird man: the expression of a longing to flee the mess we’ve made.

Or maybe it’s just an irrelevant pile of old cock.