Outside the auditorium, a notice informs the audience that they will be filmed during the performance. Inside, handheld cameras are trained on people through the darkness once the play begins. Across the gloom, you think, they can't pick up much and the anxiety begins to subside.
There is also the powerful distraction of the play within Scarlet Theatre's "reality theatre show", an adaptation of Werner Schwab's The Presidents, with a cracking translation by David Hale. Three women sit and watch television, swooning towards its horrors and its banalities in equal measure as they share their disappointments and fantasies. These two scenes - pulsating with Schwab's absurdist, cruel and deeply scatological world view, and acted with much relish for the grim material - are the production's impressive heart of darkness. If only this could have been left to stand alone.
Instead, it is the basis for much gimmickry and largely pointless messing about with television images. In a third scene, three younger actresses run through the same lines as the women we have been listening to, doing so in a heightened, hysterical tone and at manic speed. While they do this, we see images of the audience, recorded earlier, with close-ups of people yawning, picking their noses, smiling, eating, drinking and nodding off.
The idea is to show our reactions - lack of interest, cruel detachment, boredom - to the gruesome events unfolding on stage, and to compare this to the greedy gobbling-up of humiliations brought to us by reality television. It falls entirely flat. What you see on screen is what people look like when they watch theatre, and that's a very different thing. There is frustratingly little connection between these audience images and the human suffering acted out before us, and you are left only with the hollow feeling of a big idea unravelling into confusion.
· Until October 31. Box office: 020-8237 1111. Then touring.
