For almost 20 years the theatre animation company Faulty Optic has been living up to its name. Experience one of this company's surreal shows, with their tiny animated objects and figures and live video installations, and you often feel as if you're seeing it through a splinter in the eye or, even more disturbingly, have mistakenly got stranded inside someone else's oddly wired brain.
There is a high level of the weird and the bizarre that has deservedly won Faulty Optic a cult following throughout Europe and the US. Their latest show, getting its London premiere courtesy of the London International Mime festival, doesn't buck the trend. Set in a decaying world - perhaps just before the first world war - it concerns a pantomime horse working in burlesque. The show gallops backwards and forwards in time to recount the events that led to the antihero being incarcerated in a mental hospital suffering from terrible diarrhoea. Along the way, it takes in mutilation and obsession, and offers a murderous clown in the theatre of war as well as an intimate insight into the decomposition of a body. It is touched by the terrible tenderness of the terminally broken and damaged.
The flashbacks can be a trifle hard to follow and, as ever, the company is stronger on atmosphere than it is on narrative. The storytelling can be awkward, but not so the soundtrack by Daniel Padden of the band Volcano the Bear, which is quite extraordinary. It burrows into your brain and conjures imaginary times and places that seem intimately connected to the real historical world of early 20th-century London. Strange, surreal and curiously affecting.
· Until Thursday. Box office: 020-7930 3647.
