Earlier this year, Richard Maxwell's Showcase at the Renaissance Hotel in Holborn, London, gave an insight into the anonymous freedom of the hotel room, the way it strips us of the disguises we hide behind in everyday life. In a variation on a theme, Gob Squad meld theatre with reality TV in the Great Eastern Hotel.
In a comfortable bar, the audience watch four large screens that relay the activities of four people in four different rooms over five hours. Occasionally a telephone rings; an audience member can answer and engage with one of the characters, perhaps in a game of truth or dare.
When you can stay in and watch evictions from the Big Brother house, I am not sure why anyone would want to go out to see a simulation of reality TV. The lack of "liveness" doesn't make for great theatre, and the lack of interaction between the isolated performers doesn't make for compulsive television.
The appeal of Big Brother is in watching the housemates interact and rub each other the wrong way. We assign each of them characteristics and roles to play as though they were characters in a pantomime. Here, the characters resort to silly wigs and glasses to raise a laugh. Nor is the interaction between audience and performers spectacularly successful.
When I left halfway through (you can stay as long as you like), the most exciting thing that had happened was that an audience member had asked one performer to jump on the bed and some of the audience had been persuaded to get up and dance. Perhaps I missed an orgy, but if this is an exercise in seeing how far an audience will go, it is hard not to think that the British public behaved with more entertainingly collective evil intent when it repeatedly voted for Natalie Appleton to keep doing the tasks in I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 020-7618 5000.
