The Harold Shipman affair and the children's organ scandal has had the medical profession tottering on its pedestal in recent months. Now Peter Wolf's play about DNA, genetic engineering and diseases of the mind paints a picture of doctors so incompetent, uncaring and arrogant that it adds to the idea that it might be safer to steer clear of hospitals.
Jade, however, adores hospitals. They are her favourite place. She loves them so much that she's there every Monday in Accident and Emergency, the wounds on her body being tended to by Chris, a doctor who knows that, although blood is pouring out of her self-inflicted cuts, it is her mind that really hurts. He wants her to get professional help, but help arrives in the form of religious nutter Robbie.
Will God or the doctors do for Jade first? It's a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, particularly when Dr Chris is suspended from his job for negligence and starts to take a closer personal interest in Jade, who is by now displaying all the signs of stigmata. Her hands and feet weep blood and there is a wound in her side.
Into the Mystic was produced by the disabled theatre company Graeae, which has done some exceptionally fine work in the past couple of years that has seriously explored our relationship to our bodies in thought-provokingly theatrical ways. And it was developed through the Disabled Writers' Mentoring Scheme, which pairs disabled writers with established writers. Wolf's mentor was Mark Ravenhill. One might have guessed that from the style and thematic concerns of the piece, but you wonder why Ravenhill didn't do more to make the piece more coherent. I spent a lot of this 75 minutes both baffled and, I am sorry to say, bored.
My suspicion is that director Jenny Sealey has tried to paper over the cracks in the writing with a stylish production that makes particularly effective use of video to create the buzzy, edgy urban environment. But from Robbie's arrival into the action, Sealey pitches things so high that the combination of the production's increasingly creepy religious imagery and a script that is ever more incoherent creates a kind of sensory overload. It becomes like seeing a play in a foreign language: you understand odd words and sometimes seem to be getting the gist, but entire passages remain incomprehensible. I never found out - or even cared - why everyone was shouting a lot and taking their clothes off.
Until February 10. Box office: 020-8237 1111. Then touring until the end of March.
