Camera Lucida, devised and directed by Dickie Beau, nods in the direction of Roland Barthes’s book by the same name. It hinges on absence and the paradox that a dead body is and is not the person who owned it. Theatre is a medium – an attractive idea in theory. Figures in black work laptops like ouija boards. There is red smoke, a call for Houdini and lip-synching (skilfully done) of voices from the beyond: Virginia Woolf, William Burroughs, Terence McKenna. A mechanical piano lets rip – look, no hands! But absence is a dangerous subject for theatre. This is a static, wilfully moribund evening. It might work better as an essay.
• Camera Lucida is at the Barbican, London EC2 until 8 November
