The programme gleefully warns "Some material may shock" – they should be so lucky. Genre-parody sketches around the Daedalus myths of Pasiphaë and the Minotaur are interspersed with segments about the violence of the individual and the state (yep, Nazism): but neither strand provides a context for the other, leaving the spectacle of the second act (when the horrors are supposedly "for real") dangling in a void. Too gratuitous to shock – just pointless.
Effective stage productions in this field are those that show awareness of the very impossibility of making meaningful comment: this company still believes the mere fact of presentation is sufficiently weighty. The backdrop proclaims "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough" – but you can tell what falls far, far short of it.
Written for City Limits magazine.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.
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