In a large New York office building, a group of security guards go about their work in a desultory manner. Unable to actually do anything - through a corporate fear of being sued - the guards wait passively for an attack by an unknown assailant. Their eyes are as blank as the white screens on the walls around them; visibly fearful, they sweat from every pore. Every now and again, a mountain of a man enters and commits random acts of violence that have an entertaining comic-book edge to thema like a parody of martial arts movies - until the blood really does start to flow.
Shows created by Richard Maxwell and his New York City Players are so distinctive they could never be mistaken for work by anyone else. Maxwell has developed a technique in which his actors speak the script with little inflection and no feeling. When somebody in a Maxwell production tells you how they feel, or about some gargantuan emotion they are experiencing, they do so with all the animation of the speaking clock. The result is often both weirdly compelling and curiously moving - as if language has suffered a catastrophic haemorrhage that leaves it exposed.
The trouble with always working on the same canvas is that you fill it up pretty quickly. And if, like Maxwell, you always use the same technique, you risk becoming formulaic; you start to think it is not what you say but the way you say it that really matters.
At its best, Maxwell's work offers a view on the world and how we relate - or fail to relate - to each other that seems brutally fresh compared to the over-dramatics of most theatre. However, its deliberately bad acting and lack of tonal deviation risk sending the audience to sleep.
The End of Reality touches all the bases of modern America: anxiety about attack; the desire to be famous in the movies; the breakdown of family; attitudes to violence, faith and religion - but it explores none of them in any depth. Just as his security guards embark on rambling monologues in which they are talking to nobody but themselves, so Maxwell seems to be having an increasingly closed dialogue with himself. The result is an evening whose primary function is as an exercise in numbness.
· Until November 18. Box office: 0845 1207550.
