What is beauty? What is it like to be the object of desire? Most of us will never know, for most of us live in the realm of the ordinary. Maybe it is not such a bad place to be. Only Pity Beane doesn't think that way.
Pity is a Canadian art historian at the heart of the latest puppet play from Ronnie Burkett. Since she was 13 she has been in love with a beautiful boy in a painting that she found in a book in the library. Now she has arrived at a brothel inVienna in search of the painting and in search of herself.
Burkett's wooden marionettes are things of beauty, and he manipulates them with such delicacy and imbues with such expressive energy that you hardly know where a human arm ends and a wooden arm begins. But at almost two-and-a-quarter hours, the search for beauty is a rather long one. And here, unlike in Burkett's previous shows, there is not enough humour or anger to leaven the piece, which takes its own philosophical possibilities just a little too seriously.
Part of the problem is that Burkett takes too long to get to the heart of the story. Although the early parts of the evening, which convey some of the back-story through character, have some pleasures, the piece is too phonetic and has a studied self-consciousness that distances the audience from the story itself. It is only in the final 45 minutes, when Burkett really gets down to narrative business and Pity discovers the terrible secret of the painting, that the show transforms itself from mildly interesting ugly duckling into genuine swan.
There is an uncompromising boldness in the execution of this sequence that is galvanising, and somehow all the more shocking because the characters are puppets rather than live actors. There is no disputing, too, that the final image of Pity Beane skating - a woman on thin ice - is exquisite and not just a trick of the light.
· Until May 15. Box office: 0845 120 7511. A version of this review appeared in later editions of Saturday's paper.
