A serial killer is on the loose. He is a dangerous man who really wants to get under the skin of his victims in the most macabre way. He is also getting under the skin of Detective Inspector Grace. Her one hope is Simon, played by Declan Harvey, a blind man who spends his days locked away in his room surfing the radio waves with his scanner. Simon has synaesthesia - he hears sound in colour - and he recognises the killer's voice as cold and green.
TV's The Bill meets physical theatre in Chris Dunkley's adaptation of Carlo Lucarelli's psychological thriller, in a production by Lu Kemp that has won this year's Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award.
It is a production of genuine panache, choreographed with flair by Dominic Leclerc and performed by actors whose dance training really shows to the good. The question that hangs over the whole evening is less "Who did it?" than "Why is this show on the stage at all?", when it is so clearly better suited to the radio. It is probably significant that the director is also producing a radio version of the novel by the excellent Judith Adams to be broadcast on Radio 4 in early February.
However good the physical work is here - and it is very good - it still seems imposed rather than springing organically from the themes and impetus of the narrative. Kemp has yet to learn as a director that more isn't always better; in fact, insistent bustle and no still, quiet centre only highlights the emptiness at the heart of the production.
Emptiness is, of course, one of the major themes of a story of dislocation and loneliness where everybody has lost the knack of connecting and feeling for each other. But in trying to create the desolate sense of a city inhabited by a ghostly murderer who constantly changes appearance to look like his last victim, Kemp goes for sensory overload. He piles on not just the physical, but an aural soundscape, a filmic staging and uses sliding screens that just won't stay still. The high gloss of the production is initially very seductive, but after 90 minutes the show doesn't so much get under your skin as threaten to bring on a migraine.
· Until December 11. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
