The latest piece from Polish outdoor theatre stars Teatr Biuro Podrozy is inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but the brilliant opening sequence puts you more in mind of A Clockwork Orange. A young bride and groom, flushed with champagne and love, are set upon by shadowy figures who emerge out of rubbish bins. The woman is stripped. Fear lurks behind every pillar in the National's outdoor square as rape and death come in an instant, even as brightly-lit buses trundle blindly over Waterloo Bridge. It's this collision of the everyday and the world of the imagination that ups the ante in a piece that transposes Conrad's tale from the Belgian Congo to our own concrete jungles. The horror revealed here is less an internal journey up the river of self into the soul and mores of a society of haves and have nots; it's not civilisation against savagery, but rather freedom against slavery, the valued against the under-valued - something the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe might well approve of.
The piece's two other most impressive sequences see groups of people pursued by exterminators on stilts as if they were vermin; after a subsequent scientific examination, a dead body is dumped in the rubbish. None of this is particularly subtle and, to be honest, too much knowledge of Conrad's original is probably a hindrance in a show that paints in bold brushstrokes rather than detail. A lot of the time I wasn't precisely sure what was going on, the voice overs are hard to hear - but I always got the general drift. I'm beginning to harbour a slight suspicion that one Teatr Biuro Podrozy show is very much like another, but I suppose you could say that one Pinter play is very like another, too.
· Until Thursday. Free. No booking.
