(USA 1996, 97 minutes, colour). Directed and produced by Michael McNamara -- Liberty Theatre, Monday, May 5.

Once you get past the title and Allan Williams hilarious stand-up act as a burnt out 60's survivor, you are left wondering whether `The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati' is really another translation of a theatre piece masquerading as a movie. Who cares? There were lots of laughs to tide over any attempt to label this gem.

The film is a distilled version of `The Cockroach Trilogy', a theatre show created by Williams which has been on the road since the 1980s. Many such efforts at translating theatre to the screen fail. This one works because of its quirky humour and sly pacing by director Michael McNamara. He allows Cockroach to breathe by giving us much needed visual pauses between Williams's anecdotes, which are delivered at supersonic intensity.

Ambiguities are courted in this mad bash at the hip counterculture faith in the power of music and musicians. Who is Williams character "the Captain''? Aspiring rock and roll star, professional comedian, a superhero wielding a fish-slicer, or just someone in need of therapy? Can we take any of this seriously? Set in present day Windsor, Ontario, the film documents the Captain's memory of his life as he moves hell bent on a verbal trashing of everything he experienced during the age of rock and roll. He awakes from the dream on New Year's day 1980 somewhere in Lancashire after destroying all his records and posters. He realises that the stars are just ordinary people who made it because they were determined to succeed and that he should stop being angry with them.

He ends up as a professional comedian in England, opening for Trevor and the Golden Gates of Dispair, described as a "Dadaist rockabilly'' band. His career ends because he couldn't make people laugh during the nuclear age.

After a brief attempt as a publisher of a counterculture magazine, he ends up in Windsor where he goes mad for a while.

Now he is after "pure thoughts'' and a sense of his wild experiences. History he says is a set of rituals which in turn spews up "nonsensical rituals''-- by implication blind faith in the manufactured heroes of music.

Alan Williams first developed his theatre version of Cockroach as three plays at England's Hull Truck Theatre. He brought it to Canada as part of the Toronto International Theatre Festival in 1980, then emigrated to the country in 1983. After touring the show extensively he adapted the plays into the screenplay for McNamara.

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