Stumbling across Sleep No More in the dimly lit rooms of a deserted school is so shocking that you feel a bit as Macbeth and Banquo must have felt when they encountered the witches. It creates a world so haunting that you feel as if you have entered a parallel universe. The London of December 2003 simply ceases to exist and you are transported to a 1930s film-noirish world of intrigue, double-dealing and bloody murder.
Punchdrunk has transformed Shakespeare's Macbeth and, although you will need more than a passing knowledge of the play to make the connections, I suspect that the experience is sufficiently novel that, even if you had never heard of the play, you would take a puzzled pleasure in the evening.
Upon entering the building, you are given a mask and from there make your way through the rooms at your leisure. In one is the Macbeths' bedroom, where an extraordinary erotic dance of death and desire takes place. Anyone who knows Shakespeare's original will realise that this - wordless though it is - represents as terrific a playing out of act one, scene VII as you will ever see.
In the old school hall, the scene in which the ghost of Banquo appears at the Macbeths' dinner table is enacted with an idiosyncratic flourish. Another room offers you Birnam Wood, yet another the McDuffs' family home in the form of a doll's house.
Bits of the experience feel slightly skimpy, but it is an evening that rewards the effort you put in. You could do it in an hour, but you could make a three-hour evening of it if you really wanted to see the full cycle and drink in the seedy nightclub atmosphere. You will wander out into the London night disoriented and punch-drunk.
· Until Sunday. Box office: 020-8658 8341.
