Over the past 18 months, the Latchmere's new writing policy has been so successful that it has become a theatre whose productions are always something to look forward to. Alas, it comes a cropper with its first foray into plays in translation.
God is a DJ was written by the young German playwright Falk Richter, and translated - rather well - by Maja Zade. Richter's self-consciously hip but already dated play peeps into the soulless lives of a couple, a DJ and a former TV presenter, who have turned their lives into a spectacle. Their flat is wired with live webcams that link to an art gallery, and they are paid £2,000 a session for people to pop round for the evening and observe their everyday antics. We are that audience - although fortunately you will not have to pay £2,000, but a mere eight quid. Even so, I am not sure it is worth it when you could stay home and watch I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here for nothing, bar the loss of dignity and a few brain cells.
Richter puts the boot into a lot of things, including reality TV, the conception of cool, the radical art world, television interviews and critics and a world where, as the woman breathlessly opines: "Creative people don't write; they get written about." But here, as with reality TV, you have to sit through an awful lot of tedious stuff for the occasional moments of interest.
In the end this comes down to two hours (no interval) of a small play set in a small room about two not particularly interesting people who have turned their lives into a lucrative commodity and thus are no longer able to distinguish truth from fiction, real life from performance. You would yawn all the way through were it not for actors Anna Hope and Tony Devlin, who up the evening's ante with brave and compulsively watchable performances.
· Until February 8. Box office: 020-7978 7040.
