All theatre is a kind of voyeurism. You sit in the dark, eavesdropping on lives that may be make-believe but somehow seem so real. You are always the passive spectator, never the participant.
In Sacha Ware's production of Platform, based on Michel Houellebecq's provocative, sometimes pornographic novel, the sense of being a voyeur is intensified further. Every member of the audience is led to his or her own small red booth, where they sit alone watching through peep-holes while the first-person narrative is relayed through an earphone. Miriam Buether's design feels like a house of mirrors, so you are never quite sure whether you are seeing exactly what everyone else is seeing, and whether you are looking at yourself looking or watching others watch.
Form and subject are intimately matched. In the novel, Michel - a jaded, middle-aged civil servant, obsessed with sex - comes up with the idea of turning a string of failing Club Med-style resorts into destinations for sex tourists. He plans to call them El Dorado Aphrodite and market them with the slogan: "Because pleasure is a right." It is, he discovers, "a virgin market", and therefore he is likely to make a killing. He does - but not quite in the way that he imagines. There is a grim humour in Houellebecq's writing, as if he knows himself and us too well to sugar the pill.
As a theatrical experience, the hour is all concept and very little action. It never persuades you that this interior monologue is better relayed through your ear than off the page, silently, in your head. Largely, this is because it is so interior, and because Wares never finds a satisfactory visual stimulus for the words. For most of the evening, all you are watching is a man lying alone on a bed. And although his every pore exudes the ennui of western existence that Houellebecq's novel critiques, it is not enough to get you very excited.
· Until December 16. Box office: 020-7930 3647.
