Everyone in Peter Straughan's new play wants to be someone else. Ray is a security guard who wants to be a private eye. Alison is a telephone sex-line worker who wants to be a femme fatale. Ruth is a media studies lecturer who wants to be a criminal. And Straughan's script is a stage play that wants to be a film.
Last year the artist Douglas Gordon displayed three projections of the same black-and-white thriller running side by side at different speeds, so that each screen flashed up echoes and premonitions of the others. Straughan seems to be playing a similar game. Multiple narratives are set in train, and the chronology chops capriciously back and forth between them, until it is clear that you are actually watching several plays at once.
Whether the average intellect can meet such a challenge is another matter. Mine was a smoking ruin not long after the interval, when a violent murder sequence gave the appearance of being a much-needed plot development, until the victim calmly got up and participated in the scene that followed. Back to square one.
The point seems to be that while we readily accept free-form narrative gymnastics in the cinema, we still expect orderly, linear storytelling in the theatre. Max Roberts's production compounds the confusion by endeavouring to be in both places at once. Roberts sets the play against a giant cinema screen, juxtaposing projected subtitles with little pockets of action revealed behind. Yet everything moves so fast that, without the benefit of cinematic tools such as the close-up, everything looks curiously miniaturised, and crucial details go for naught. It wasn't until poring over the script afterwards that it became clear that a briefcase brandished in one scene had belonged to someone else shortly before.
The acting is, however, outstanding, particularly from Michael Hodgson's deranged wannabe detective and Jim Kitson's palpitating God-botherer with a gambling problem. Noir is a smoky, mysterious enigma to which everyone can supply their own theory. Whether this constitutes success or failure on the author's part is difficult to tell.
· Until May 25. Box office: 0191-230 5151.
