"So who was the murderer?" asked one puzzled woman on leaving this revival of Robert Lepage's teasing 1987 metaphysical detective story. Based on a real-life case - the unsolved rape and murder of a young actress in Quebec City in 1980, for which Lepage himself was briefly the chief suspect - the question isn't who did it, or why they did it, but how it was done.
Like an autopsy discovering hidden secrets, these stunning 90 minutes peel away layer upon layer of theatrical convention, drawing on the imagery of film noir, the splatter movie, Hamlet and the Berlin wall to tell a story of love, guilt, life, death, and the way we wall ourselves up and close our minds to the obvious. This is an evening of skeletons that sit up, ghosts that walk, bricks that seep blood, and the darker corners of the human mind.
As with much of Lepage's work, a lot of it is done with mirrors. You keep wishing you could hit a rewind button to check that you really did see what you thought you saw. The form of the piece closely reflects its subject: the elusiveness of truth; the fact that it is always multi-layered and never absolute. Played against, above and around a vast solid wall, like the backdrop of a cheap film set, the piece creates a shadowy, slightly sinister urban landscape in which the apparently unconnected lives of the three protagonists collide and intertwine.
François, a young waiter who likes violent sexual games, is the neighbour of Lucie, an actress cast in a movie as a murder victim. Only towards the end of the shoot does she discover that she is playing the woman whom François was suspected of killing some years previously, and that her new lover, Christof, was the pathologist on the case.
Giles Croft's production has the sleight of hand to match Lepage's text, and if the evening never warms up emotionally, the sense of dislocation and distance has its own benefits, casting the audience as camera, voyeur and possibly even murderer.
Until November 24. Box office: 0115-941 9419.
