Pantomime season has arrived early at the Barbican this year, and it brings with it a whopping turkey in Anna Mackmin's sadly misguided revival of Francis Beaumont's 1607 comedy. The play is astonishing in the radicalism of its conception and construction: a satire on the social fluidity of Jacobean London, with the rising middle class, it imagines the staging of a typical production that is rudely interrupted from the audience by a grocer and his wife who insist that their grinning son take a leading role. What follows is a play within a play within a play as several unrealities collide in a satire on the fustiness of chivalric romance. As one of the characters takes over the stage, directing the action to her liking, you are struck by the fact that it took British theatre nigh on 400 years to really embrace Beaumont's theatrical game-playing and bold experiment in disrupting the spectacle.
Alas, this is not the production to demonstrate that fact. Mackmin has transformed the nouveau riche of Beaumont's time into the chavs of today. And while the publicity optimistically invokes Monty Python and Little Britain, so laboured is the comedy and so tawdry the design that the reality is closer to an amateur dramatic society's Aladdin, circa 1973. Many of the performances show signs of strain, suggesting nobody on stage really believes in the play. If the cast isn't having a good time, why should we?
There are moments of geniality in the portrayal of London's citizens, and some touching scenes in the romantic plot, but it is a desperate evening that doesn't so much end as slowly congeal, like an unwanted Christmas dinner.
· Until October 8. Box office: 0845 120 7554.
