Festival review: Dad Doesn’t Dance; TheSpace @ Surgeons Hall (venue 53)

This one-woman show builds upon a fondly told personal tale with an air of soothing tenderness established in the delivery of actress Nora Brown.

A sometime dancer, she moves from scene to scene with a casual skip and click of the heels, an almost balletic framing sequence to a capably told story. She was, she tells us, raised unaware that her father wasn’t her natural “biodad” so, faced with the knowledge of a whole new genetic history out there, and because “now that Frank isn’t my father, I don’t have to hate him any more”, she sets out to discover her real father.

The running time is perhaps overlong for the actual substance of the story. Yet Brown is an actress possessed of a smooth, old-school charm, and to hear her describe the locations on her journey from Canada to California, or impersonate the grizzled old men of the music industry – of which her real father is one, a gruff Hollywood impresario with an eye for the ladies who escaped a pogrom in Russia – is an understated pleasure.

Rating: * * *

Until 18 August. Today 5:20pm.