It is New Year's Eve 1999 and in the Millennium Dome in Greenwich it is the end of an era for Gustav Drool and his freak show. The trouble is that Aqua the mermaid, Avia, the woman with wings, and Christian the wobbly boy are no longer such a draw when you can turn on the TV any time and watch the Gerry Springer show. Besides, as we all so fervently seem to believe on the cusp of the millennium, the future is going to be just perfect. No room for Drool and his gang.
But Drool is in combative mood and he's down fighting at the last chance saloon: exploiting his performers' weakness, manipulating their emotions and spurring them on to ever greater acts of degradation. And wouldn't you just know it, Drool is one of them. We all are. Drool knows all our weak spots, our prejudices and fears. "Who needs a hall of mirrors when you've got us?"
The GRAEAE company is in combative mood, too, for this potentially ground-breaking examination of disability issues. But while it lights the fuse it doesn't quite have the courage to detonate the bomb. The failure of nerve comes less from Mike Kenny's script, which often displays an aggressive beauty as well as an ironic turn of phrase, and more from the structure of the performance. What could be better in a piece about our perceptions of people's physical form and beauty than to smash our traditional perceptions of theatre?
The frustrating thing about Jenny Sealey's production is that it goes so far, but not far enough: the circus tent, the video screen and the installation all hint at striving towards something more radical, but the different elements of the show are not imaginatively integrated and what we end up with is a bit of this and a bit of that and an awful lot of sitting on hard seats in rows.
Still, this is the kind of failure that I can admire and for all its weaknesses you can't but applaud the cussedness of the enterprise. And in Gustav Drool, Kenny and actor Gerry Robson have created a monstrous character, the cripple who cripples others.
On tour at The Roundhouse, London (July 20-24, 0171-344 4444), Live Theatre, Newcastle (July 26-27, 0191-232 1232) and The Pleasance at the Edinburgh Fringe (August 6-21, 0131-556 6550).
