In my job, every time you step into the theatre it is an act of faith. Experience may tell you the odds are that the evening has little chance of being astonishing, perhaps even life-changing. But every night you believe that it will be, and that tonight is going to be the night you are going to see the show you have always dreamed about in your head. Otherwise you'd never make it out of bed.
I wish I hadn't for The Jesus Guy, a piece that purports to be about the nature of belief, but which turns out to be a sacred cow that defies all belief by the extent of its own ineptitude and self-righteousness in believing that boring other people rigid with your theatrical experiments is justified in the name of art.
Perhaps it was because I had just come from the spare rectitude of Beckett at the Barbican, but Julia Lee Barclay's script is cacophonous with clatter and clutter as the cast skip around the stage, don pigs' snouts, put bowls on their heads and ramble on about Easter eggs, bunnies, crucifixion and resurrection and not being able to take the train because of the men in green with machine guns. It's like some fusty 1960s-style happening. "Jesus wept," announces somebody. By that point I was inconsolable.
The gimmick is that not a word of the script has been assigned to the performers. All of them have learned the whole thing and then during the performance they spout the bits they fancy and improvise, a bit like jazz musicians. In other hands, the idea could have potential, but at the performance I attended it only added to the flabby and aimless nature of the proceedings. Long before the 90 minutes were up I was silently praying for it to stop. God failed to answer the SOS, so at least now I know for certain that he doesn't exist.
· Until April 16. Box office: 08700 600 100.
