Memory is a treacherous place, a bog that can drag you down into its gassy depths and play tricks on you. Yet memory can also point the way to liberation, and allow us to take from the past so that we can make ourselves a future.
In Forget Me Not, an impressive clown show of haunting dilapidated beauty and few laughs, memory is both these things for Paka, a Don Quixote-style dreamer who escapes his hospital bed and plunges along the rutted highway of his past on his mechanical steed. The full-size horse has to be seen to be believed: it is an extraordinary junk-metal creation with moving parts made from wires, pumps, wheels and car batteries, and it exudes the thrilling and terrifying power of real flesh and blood.
If Forget Me Not stirs the soup of memory for Paka, so it does for the audience, too. The show takes you back to childhood: the excitement of the fairground carousel, the tantalising mysteries of the circus tent. Andy Lavender's artful production is a theatrical high-wire act that quite literally plays with fire. There may be only one flesh-and-blood performer, but there is a cast of hundreds. A cunning use of film takes you out of the theatre and into the world beyond - even into space - to tell the story of a tragic love that burns with real passion.
Perhaps a little more levity wouldn't go amiss, for if this is clowning, it is very much at the existential end of the scale. The birds twitter mercilessly as Paka's life gallops headlong towards disaster, his face the mask of a man who knows everything and nothing. It is a small show, but a haunting one, full of sweet despair.
· Until January 30. Box office: 020-8692 4446.
