The appearance of wagons in the theatre usually suggests entertainment on an epic scale. The medieval mysteries, once performed on the backs of carts, lasted several hours each. Brecht's Mother Courage, with its canteen wagon, is a similarly long haul. Now Jonathan Holloway has produced a play about a wagon train that takes all winter.
Holloway's play is a demonstration of how the west was glum: a dramatisation of the progress of George and Jacob Donner, American pioneers who set out in 1846 to trek from crowded, cholera-stricken Illinois to a new life in California. Of the 87 members of the Donner party, only 45 survived, having been forced to subsist on mountain geese, axle grease and, finally, each other.
The show is advertised as "a testament to the heroism and determination of the human spirit". This must surely apply to the audience as well, given that we're treated to such imagery as a baby strung up and gnawed at like a ham, or a human heart "spitting on a stick". One's overall ability to digest this show depends on whether you can stomach this grisly Donner kebab.
Though the subject matter is unremittingly bleak, Giles Croft's expansive staging is often rather beautiful. Jamie Vartan's design exploits the technical resources of the Playhouse to the full: blizzards blow in with chilling verisimilitude, and there is an astonishing moment when the cast are revealed to have hunkered down and set up camp in the orchestra pit.
If there's a flaw, it's that the Brechtian division of the action into short, subtitled scenes makes it hard to identify, let alone identify with, many of the characters. Holloway's play is an epic hymn to man's capacity for survival, but it leaves you feeling for humanity, rather than individual human beings.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0115-941 9419.
