The twinkling lights suggest that the stage is set for a fairytale fantasy, but the woman standing centre stage tells another story. Clad in black, only her eyes visible, she holds a gun and has a belt of explosives wrapped around her waist.
It is hardly what you expect when you have brought your family and friends for a night out at a musical, but it was what happened to the 900-strong audience at a Moscow theatre in October 2002 when they were taken hostage by Chechen rebels demanding the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya.
Many of the rebels were women, known as "the black widows", a reference not just to their garb but to the fact that their desperate act was fuelled by the deaths of so many husbands in the ongoing war. Fifty-seven hours later all 42 rebels would be dead, and so were more than 130 hostages after a bungled rescue attempt.
What impact Natalia Pelevine's play has is entirely due to Julian Woolford's powerful staging, which uses the whole New End auditorium. To my immediate left is a talkative American hostage with a heart problem. In front of me a deeply unpleasant German business man who tries to buy his way out of trouble, and to my right a mother and her grown-up daughter, whose uneasy relationship emerges as the siege continues. It is uncomfortable being in the thick of it, particularly when a Chechen rebel eyeballs you too.
In reality, this fictionalised version of real events is no more than a variation on one of drama's archetypal stuck-in-a-lift scenarios in which the protagonists reveal their true selves as the crisis unfolds. Although the experience leaves you mildly shaken, it serves no particular purpose, and therefore also seems exploitative.
There are good performances all round, but you leave the theatre none the wiser and feeling that what you have seen doesn't even begin to tell the whole story behind the headlines.
· Until October 15. Box office: 0870 033 2733.
