The recent London and Glasgow bombs certainly makes Verb Theatre's show about 7/7 topical, and I have no doubt the company's heart is in the right place in its desire to remind us that "52 people died that day" and "each one of them has a story".
The problem is the way they go about it: during this 75-minute show, it is impossible to unravel exactly whose stories are being told. The survivors? Those who died? Or just the stories of the actors themselves - a programme note tells us they have created the show using a storytelling technique that "encourages actors to use their own lives and experiences as a stimulus to create theatre". Another programme note tells us that "all the actors play themselves", but when it becomes clear at the end that at least two of the characters are dead, you really stop believing the programme notes. Or indeed anything else.
I am sure there is no intention to deceive, but the blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction, the lives of the actors and lives of those who died is at best confusing, and often feels downright opportunist, as if the company were grief vultures picking over the bones of other people's terrible experience and appropriating the juiciest bits.
The show is at its best as a hymn to the city and as a kaleidoscopic snapshot of a busy London morning, with preoccupied commuters rushing blindly towards oblivion. But the entwining monologues - based, I assume, on the actors' own lives - are dully written, and the sentiments expressed too often banal and full of hokey homespun wisdom about living in the moment and being nice to each other.
· Until July 7. Box office: 020-8985 2424.
