Life is a waiting room. Only children live in the present, the rest of us are always looking forward, hurrying on to the next thing, waiting for our number to come up-in the lottery draw, the hospital A&E, in love, in the immigration queue to gain entry to the country and new life of your dreams. We even wait for the theatre to start. The latest show from the Anglo-Brazilian theatre company, Dende Collective, shows how easy it is to forget to live in all those in-between moments in our lives, in the troughs between the twin peaks of birth and death.
Passing through a room where a hospitalised man lies either dead or sleeping, you are ushered into another space where you are allocated a seat numbered and accosted by a coffin salesman with a nifty line in caskets. He offers you his condolences and tries to sell you something from his range - the Fairway to Heaven coffin aimed at the keen golfer, or the Return to Sender - ideal for the deceased postman. What follows is a series of apparently unconnected sketches about love, birth, death, traumatic diagnoses of terminal illness and visits to the vet, that eventually converge to tell the story of a young man called Angelo whose number has finally come up.
Like the company's last show, The Piranha Lounge, this is refreshingly different 90 minutes in the theatre. Unlike that piece though there is a serious lack of opportunity for character development, and the sketch-like format makes the evening seem itsy-bitsy and hard to get a handle on. It is only in the final 10 minutes that facetiousness gives way to real feeling and the evening starts to pack the emotional punch it desperately needs.
Nonetheless this is promising work from a young company who are intent on forging a unique voice for themselves, and for all its flaws the evening has an endearing madness and a rare determination to play with theatrical form.
· Until December 20. Box office: 020-7582 7680.
