Remember those shadow puppets you used to make on the wall as you lay in bed as a child? You could frighten yourself silly with those looming shadow monsters.
Here is the grown-up version, produced by the Belgian company Mossoux-Bonté, who have appeared in previous London international mime festivals with shows such as the Last Hallucinations of Lucas Cranach and Twin Houses, in which lighting has played an integral part.
This latest piece purports to explore our fear of the dark and, perhaps more interestingly, how our fear of something completely imaginary blacks out much more real fears. But the really scary thing about the show is the gap between intention and execution.
A woman in a red skirt is caught in a shaft of white light and appears to be dragging a heavy shadow behind her. She wants to be rid of it but it is attached to her; when she moves forward, it moves forward. What follows over the next hour is a variation on a theme, a mixture of illumination and darkness.
At one point her stomach glows in the dark; at another it is as if she has been entirely obliterated by huge shadows, snuffed out by nothingness. At others she is attacked by Edward Scissorhands claws, only the claws are attached to her own hands.
There is something urban and slightly sinister about it, a feeling compounded by the use of white noise and vaguely electronic sounds, and a sense of encroaching threat: like John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, but with darkness rather than plants as the enemy. I might be in danger of making this interminable 60 minutes sound considerably more interesting than it is.
The problem is that the piece ploughs its intellectual furrow within the first few minutes and never attempts to make an emotional connection with the audience. The result is that you feel that you are watching a clever box of tricks: theatre almost entirely reduced to a few ingenious lighting effects. It could give paying to sit in the dark a very bad name.
· Until January 22. Box office: 020-7930 3647.
