Marisa Carnesky is no actress, but golly can she turn in a performance. Best known for her show, Jewish Tattooess, in which she explored the taboo of body markings from the Nazis' enforced tattooing of Jews to her own body art, Carnesky's latest piece also entwines the personal and the political, individual testimony and collective memory. Although it plays with illusion and magic, it offers the audience not delusions but hard truths about centuries of dispossession and displacement.
Set in a fairground, a mixture of tat and exotica, and drawing on her family history, the work braids together personal stories and fairy tales. Carnesty tells of her great-grandfather, who left Riga on a New York-bound boat on which cholera broke out. The American authorities refused everyone on board entry and Carnesky's great-grandfather eventually found refuge at Tilbury, a reminder that we were once more welcoming to asylum seekers than we are now. And there is the tale of Irina, who is duped into believing that she can get a job as a nanny in the west and is sold into prostitution, her long hair nailed to the wall.
You can really sense the past and future, the long dead and the not yet living, as Carnesky tells of the Roma girl Yesina, who saves her Slovakian settlement from destruction and her family from massacre through her quick-wittedness, and the Russian stripper Katya who reveals her body on her own terms and is now rumoured to be living in a loft apartment in the east end of London. There are times during this brief hour when it seems as if the entire history of Europe's faceless, dispossessed and disappeared has been crammed into the studio.
You get the feeling that this is still very much a work in progress, and there are passages, particularly towards the end, where Carnesky makes way for filmed testimony. But the piece's ragged quirkiness is all part of its power, as is the way that Carnesky presents a startling body of evidence about Europe's invisible people.
· Until June 29. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
