Theatre increasingly seems to feed off movies. And in Unheimlich Spine director-deviser David Glass takes his inspiration from a cult 1959 horror film, The Tingler, directed by William Castle. The weirdly wonderful, if still evolving, result is a strange mix of Gothic flesh-creeper, camp send-up and celebration of the infinite diversity of human life.
The MacGuffin - the unlikely premise for the spiralling plot - is an obsessive scientist's discovery of a parasite that takes possession of the human backbone and is the source of all fear. The mad prof enlists the help of the bizarre Bobby Bangs, who projects cinema titles onto a blank screen and allows audiences to imagine the film, and who delivers his apparently dead, deaf-mute wife, Close-up Alice, to the doctor for surgical experiment. The removal of her "unhomely spine" leads to her resuscitation, confrontation with her own fear and, ultimately, to her, and everyone else's, regeneration.
The plot may be tosh, but not, as I feared, sadistic tosh. Indeed, what strikes one is Glass's mixture of spiritual benignity and theatrical inventiveness. He clearly believes we have nothing to fear except fear itself and that we need to conquer our irrational terrors. But he also mixes live action, video projections and film music - much of it from Bernard Herrmann's scores for Psycho and Vertigo - with considerable skill. The operation on Alice, suspended at one point in a giant sling behind a whirling glass screen, has a particularly nightmarish effectiveness.
Admittedly there are elements at which I jib: most of all the implication that deaf-mutes can somehow find their faculties restored by shock-therapy. But, for a show much possessed by death, there is a strong life-affirming element, symbolised by the final video projection of a human embryo to a kitsch rendition of Stranger in Paradise.
Kathryn Hunter also brings her customary prodigious inventiveness to Close-up Alice: looking for her missing dog she acquires an all-fours canine desperation, and when her seemingly dead body is transported in a jerky car her limbs take on a flailing independence. Sophie Partridge, who has trained with the Graeae Company, lends Alice's embodied fear a paradoxical angelic sweetness and there is robust support from Amit Lahav as the wild-haired scientist, Therese Bradley as his cabaret-singer wife and Richard Clews as the constantly erect Bobby Bangs. A peculiar evening but one that sees life through a Glass kindly.
Until March 18. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
