The sound of dripping water echoes around the theatre. It reminds you less of a wonky tap than of water dripping down through the unconscious, permeating the subterranean caverns of memory. Formalny Theatre's imagistic rendering of Sasha Sokolov's 1976 novel, School for Fools - heralded by some as Russia's first genuinely modern novel - is as beautiful, crazily irrational and perfectly logical as a dream. It is a piece of theatre that you live from the comfort of your seat, and that can be fully understood only by the heart, not the head.
It takes you back into the childhood of a 1950s adolescent living in a communal Soviet apartment block who attends a school for the "feeble-minded". The boy is represented by two actors, a clever device that means that on this journey into the past, present and future, he keeps on meeting himself coming back. Memory, of course, always plays tricks, and just as the schoolchildren play pranks upon the teachers, so here memory is slippery and devious - but also sometimes accurate and true.
In the boy's world, the dead and the living coexist, the schoolroom and his flat's living room are full of fallen leaves, time is blurred into a loopy continuum and half-glimpsed doors and windows offer entrances into his own private Narnia, a place of witches and goodness, shadows and sunlight. This is a magical piece of theatre, with a streak of engaging, sly humour and playfulness that takes you into a theatrical world where naturalism and expressionism, realism and surrealism sit side by side. It is a distinctly foreign experience.
What does it all mean, I hear you muttering over your cornflakes. Quite frankly, I don't know and I don't really care. It doesn't matter. All I can say is that if what we see are largely the boy's delusions, then madness in this instance is preferable to the grim realities of 1950s Soviet life, offering an escape into the unfettered creativity and freedom of the imagination. Hitch a ride on the whirlwind.
· Until tomorrow. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
