It begins with a pistol shot and ends with a massacre, and in between there is plenty of murder in this musical theatre piece that uses the songs of the Smiths to tell an Alice-in-Wonderland tale of family dysfunction. These characters make Oedipus and his family look like slackers.
If you shut your eyes and just listen, it is a fabulous 90 minutes. The arrangements of Morrissey and Marr's songs are playful; sometimes dark and often lush, and the women's voices add a new and pungent emotional layer to old tunes. There are times when it has the operatic moistness of the last act of Der Rosenkavalier. Unfortunately this is a theatre piece, not a concert, and the visual elements of the production are as vacuous and bland as a pop video.
In its previous brilliant show, based on the songs of Jacques Brel, Anonymous Society created character, narrative and a sense of lives lived, through restraint, nod and nuance. There was plenty of room for the audience to bring their own emotional responses to the jigsaw being assembled on stage. Here, everything is spelled out in a production that is so hectic it would bring on a migraine in the susceptible. Performers, film and musicians all scream for your attention. Even when one person is singing and emoting wildly, others are throwing their arms around as if at a body-toning class.
I know these songs are dramatisations of teenage angst, of that ache of being 17 and seeing no light at the end of the tunnel of adolescent agony. But Andrew Wale's production is so busy, so externally flamboyant and so illustrative of the songs that it allows no room for truthful, internalised feeling. It takes Morrissey and Marr's gritty northern misery and overlays it with a polished and self-conscious angst. It kills the very thing it loves.
There are tiny diamond moments when you see the show this might have been. Most particularly when Katie Brayben's despairing teenage daughter clambers up a mountain of bodies and sings Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want. Her voice soars like an arrow heading straight for the bull's eye. Simple, deadly and true.
· Until July 23. Box office: 08700 500 511.
