People react in different ways to goths: some are scared by the black apparel, studded belts and Marilyn Manson makeup. Others laugh at their adolescent earnestness and the way these secretly sweet teenagers always hug each other before going home to bed. Gisèle Vienne, though, takes them seriously.
With a passing nod to Friedrich Rückert and Gustav Mahler, Kindertotenlieder is about a black metal fan who has been murdered by his best friend. A fusion of theatre, dance, music and art installation, the haunting production is a slow-moving meditation on the consequences of a fantasy death-wish coming true. "We used to wish it would happen like this, but your death was so much more," says the murderer to his friend's ghost in the spare script by cult American writer Dennis Cooper.
Despite the occasional bouts of violence that erupt from the flat, snowy landscape, the boy's murder appears to have been more an act of compassion than aggression. The teenagers are drawn to extremes of experience, whether it be the intensity of their music or the fetish of death, but it is in a spirit of wonder and awe, not malevolence. In this sense, the murder is an innocent confusion of fantasy and reality.
Unfortunately, the ideas in the pre-recorded dialogue go no further than that. It is in the staging that the production is most striking. In the swirling mist of the opening, there appear to be 11 actors standing motionless, shoulders hunched, in their regulation black hoodies. Slowly you realise half of these figures are mannequins, a couple of them creepily animated, gathering in front of a concert stage. They are doll-like, pale-faced and passive. At one unsettling point, the ghost appears to be the only one alive.
Throw in a couple of Maurice Sendak monsters stomping through the snow and an air of time being frozen, and you get something akin to the dreamy weirdness of David Lynch. That is a feeling reinforced by the live score by Stephen O'Malley and Peter Rehberg, a droning soundscape of reverb and distortion that could have come from Eraserhead.
It is bold and unusual stuff, worth a look when it returns to Nottingham's Dance4 Festival in October. But ultimately, it is as self-regarding as the narcissistic teenagers themselves, a hermetic vision that leaves outsiders in the cold.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 0845 330 3501.
