Mae West liked a guy who took his time. She would, you feel, have got on well with the American director Robert Wilson, whose productions have been known to last anything up to seven days.
But in this 90-minute one-man show, conceived by Anne Bogart and performed by Will Bond as part of the Barbican's BITE season, we get an elegant distillation of Wilson's artistic credo that provokes as well as informs.
Credo is putting it a little strongly since Wilson constantly downplays conceptual thought. "I'm an American, I don't have ideas," he says at one point. Elsewhere he claims: "If you know why you're doing something, don't do it."
What Wilson, a visual artist who happens to work in theatre, does have is a method: a fascination with time and space, a belief that theatrical action needs to be slowed down, a fastidious use of repetition echoing the autism he sees around us in daily life.
Some of Wilson's aphorisms are pure poppy-Cocteau. "I think naturalism is a lie: it's killed the theatre," he pronounces, thereby dismissing everyone from Chekhov to Mamet. And, for a man who claims that Broadway and TV are simply a series of one-liners, he dispenses bon mots like an intellectual Henny Youngman.
But when he gets down to brass tacks he is worth hearing. At one point he describes how slowing down a piece of film in which a mother bends to pick up her baby reveals the latent aggression underneath the tender maternal impulse.
The paradox of this show is that it deploys words to describe Wilson's instinctively visual approach. Anyone who last week saw his astonishing production of Strindberg's A Dream Play will know that Wilson has a genius for creating resonant images.
But, forced by the media into explicating his work, he hides behind the mask of the gnomic prankster, saying outrageous things to keep everyone happy.
Even if this show, culled from countless interviews, leaves Wilson's essential mystery intact, it is dashingly performed and presented. Bond, with the beaky profile of an undernourished eagle, skilfully evokes rather than impersonates Wilson.
But when he talks of the circumstances - largely to do with handsome European subsidy - that have dictated his peripatetic, expatriate existence, you sense the loss that accompanies international acclaim. You may want to argue with Wilson's ideas, but you end up liking the man.
Until June 9. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
