Ten years ago, the London premiere of Martin Crimp's play was met with hostility and incomprehension. It now comes across as prophecy. Seventeen episodes touch on the life and identity of a person or persons named Anne: she is alternately referred to as a porn star, a missing person, a make of car, and a victim or perpetrator of terrorism. Many of the major problems of contemporary global culture are touched on here - identity theft, commodification, racism, sexism, mass violence - but the elusive format forestalls didacticism.
It is disappointing that the six actors are all white Irish, given Crimp's proviso that the company should "reflect the composition of the world beyond the theatre", but otherwise director Tom Creed takes the text's openness (no prescribed number of actors, no assignment of lines) and runs wonderfully rampant with it. Conor Murphy's long, flat, white stage creates a clinical environment in which the initial scenes come across as weird parodies of advertising pitches. This starts to feel formulaic, but is quickly undercut by the cast performing a heavy rock number, and then the wonderful Hilary O'Shaughnessy delivering a lengthy sales pitch in Polish.
Creed and his team get the tone right: while the juxtaposition of styles and forms of audience address sometimes feels playful, there is an underlying note of menace, particularly in the treatment of women. The play is a catalogue of sexual objectification, a theme which comes through strongly in the penultimate scene, in which a young woman is coerced to testify that her involvement in the porn industry benefits her life.
· Until May 5. Box office: (353) 1 881 9613.
