Most performers appreciate the benefits of a captive audience. It becomes considerably harder if the crowd is actually condemned. Paulino and Carmela are a comedy double act stranded behind fascist lines during the Spanish civil war, and compelled to improvise an anti-republican pantomime for an audience of prisoners due to be executed at dawn.
The eminent Spanish playwright José Sanchís Sinisterra describes the piece as "an elegy of civil war", though it's difficult to pinpoint what this means. You could say that it's a complex exegesis of one of the least clear-cut conflicts in modern European history, coupled to an aesthetic debate about the necessity for art to deliver moral truths. But what it clearly shows is the merciless attitude taken by fascist troops towards republican prisoners - they shoot you, but they make you sit through an extremely long and impoverished variety act first.
Sinisterra's piece is better known for its 1990 movie adaptation, though one can't help wondering if the success of the film was partly explained by the fact that it's almost an hour shorter. Steve Trafford's version makes an admirable stab at conveying the elastic rhyme and rhythm of the dialogue, though you wish he had taken the opportunity to dispense with some of the more opaque and prolix material.
You cannot fault the industry of the performers - Robert Pickavance, swaying some 40 degrees from the vertical, is the very image of a derelict, vaudevillian drunk; Elizabeth Mansfield is all fiery energy and keen flamenco flourishes. Director Tom Wright has an eye for detail, but struggles to make the capricious shifts between Brechtian polemic, Beckett-style stasis and magical-realist fantasy cohere.
It could be worse - no one is threatening to shoot you afterwards. Though that's not to say there are moments when it rather saps the will to live.
· Until September 30 (box office: 01904 623568). Then touring.
