by AMY BARRATT

As any recovered gambler will tell you, there's no such thing as a sure thing. Going to theatre is always a gamble. Still, if I was forced to pick a winner among upcoming shows, I'd put my money on Imago Theatre's Snowman.

Remember girls! girls! girls!, the hit of the 2001 Fringe that was picked up by the Festival de théâtre des Amériques in 2002? For those who don't, it was a grab-you-by-the-collar production of a darkly poetic script. Well, Snowman is the latest offering from girls! playwright Greg MacArthur, and it similarly combines disturbing subject matter with glorious language.

Imago has also snagged the same director and designer who collaborated on girls!, the justly renowned Peter Hinton and Eo Sharp. If this show were a racehorse, it would definitely be favoured to win.

In Snowman, Denver and Marjorie are an aimless couple in their early 30s. Denver describes their lifestyle: "We'd drive till we hit a place we both liked/Rent an apartment, get jobs, walk around, make friends./Sometimes we'd stay a month/Sometimes a year/Depended on the job/Depended on the friends/When the time came, we'd just pack up the car and that was that."

When the play begins, they have landed somewhere up north, in "a small community at the edge of a glacial sheet." Through a combination of scenes and monologues, the play recounts the couple's involvement with Jude, a 19 year old who is completely alone in the world and partial to gay German porn. The "snowman" of the title is the frozen corpse of a boy that Jude finds out on the glacier.

Imago's production, with actors Danny Brochu, Eric Goulem, Cary Lawrence and France Rolland, runs Jan 22–31 at the Monument-National.

>> Stage Listings