Recrimination, ruined relationships, revenge - it's a wonder no one has turned the ingredients of the average college reunion into a game show before. The audience for John Godber's latest play are ushered into a mock-up of a television studio to witness the taping of an episode of Reunion, a vehicle that takes all the most iniquitous elements of gaming and reality shows and wraps them into a suspect package presided over by a host whose rottweiler grin makes Jerry Springer look like a friendly spaniel.
The object of the game is for the unlucky contestants to meet old faces from their past and inflict more humiliation than they receive, like This Is Your Life with a diabolic twist. If that sounds bad, consider yourself fortunate that it is not one of the anchor man's other ideas: Shop Your Neighbour (in which convictions win prizes) or Family Affairs, the incest show.
The target of Godber's satire is obvious, but his aim is suspect. By introducing all the television-style trappings of live response - catchphrases, audience-voting and so on - Reunion encourages people to participate in a spectacle that is clearly depraved, but fails to implicate them in the consequences of their behaviour.
I kept expecting the narrative to warp into a meta-level of concealed reality, in the manner of The Truman Show, to reveal what this distorted charade was really all about. But it never happens. Godber simply stages a simulacrum of an awful television show, and whips up all the vile, baying responses that such programmes incite.
One imagines Godber's purpose was to get uncomfortably close to the bone, but his production doesn't really begin to scrape off the first layer of fat. The lighting is too dim, the host too badly dressed and the rules too unclear for this to be a real television show.
And, unfortunately, unlike real reality TV, there's no immediate means of turning it off.
· Until January 11. Box office: 01482 323638. Then touring.
