Strindberg's chamber play about guilt, suffering, love and death is not an easy text, but promising young company Goat and Monkey make a good stab at it in this atmospheric production performed in an old subterranean workshop on Trinity Buoy Wharf, the location for London's only lighthouse. To get there you must take the Docklands light railway beyond civilisation and then walk through deserted eerie streets past blind, boarded-up buildings with broken windows. As set dressing goes, it is quite magnificent.
Inside the building, things get stranger still, as you find yourself in a dimly lit bar where even the stag on the wall and the grandfather clock are covered in flock wallpaper. The crippled murderer Hummel might invite you to take part in a scam in which only you are the loser. Peepholes in the walls give glimpses into worlds within worlds, and if you put your ear to doors you can hear whispers and creaks as if the building is crying out in despair. The sound, lighting and design are brilliant.
In a way - although plenty of startling dramatic moments follow as ghosts walk, the innocent suffer and are walled up, and the past catches up with Hummel in an astonishing watery gush, which is worth the price of admission alone - the production never quite lives up to the promise of the bar area. In part it is because some of the acting isn't good enough (although Ian Summers as Hummel and the Cook is very, very good at all-consuming Victorian villainy) and in part because the translation is mundane. The audience participation needs to be rethought, too. But I shall always remember the Narnia moment when you walk through a wardrobe, and I'd be prepared to walk even further to catch this company's next show.
· Until July 16. Box office: 07791 602029.
