For a dose of inspired lunacy, Ridiculusmus is your company. While other theatre groups merely play the fool, Ridiculusmus's David Woods and Jon Hough seem to have their minds tuned to a different frequency from that of most of the rest of the population.
They have taken us on the most extraordinarily anarchic flights of fancy in shows such as Yes, Yes, Yes, and pointed up how madness lies in the accepted normality of Northern Irish politics in Say Nothing. Not for nothing does Ridiculusmus ally itself with Samuel Beckett's last words on theatre: "To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."
If I am less enthusiastic about this latest piece, it is because the form is too tame to really "accommodate the mess". Inspired by the duo's experience of leading a workshop on creativity for a large company, Ideas Men is set in an office of swivel chairs, Post-It notes, role-playing exercises and executive Lego. Here, Mike and Liam while away their day, charged with the onerous task of coming up with ideas that will make other people money. Only in this instance, a competition is underway: one of them will win £40,000 and the other will be made redundant.
The idea of exploring the nature of creativity is a good one. After all, we live in a world where the government says that it knows culture and creativity matter, yet has instituted a national curriculum in our schools that squeezes out art and drama. Recently, Improbable Theatre's The Hanging Man amply demonstrated that to live a really creative life, you have to be prepared to take life-or-death risks.
Unfortunately, Ideas Men never gets beyond the ideas stage. As a study of the minutiae of office life - with its rivalries, irritations, sandwiches scoffed hours before lunch and casual flirtations - it never even begins to compare with television's The Office. And while the show offers glimpses of the absurdity of a corporate culture, it doesn't tell us more than we know or might suspect.
More unfortunately, the process of creating a show about the uncreative seems to have circumscribed the wilder reaches of the Ridiculusmus imagination. There are a few inspired moments, but not enough to take either company or audience to a higher plane.
· Until October 25. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
