Ah, women who love too much. They are there in the fairy tales, never more so than in Hans Christian Andersen's story of the mermaid who falls in love with a prince and makes a rotten deal with the sea witch who offers her legs - although every step will be like walking on knives - and the possibility of an immortal soul in return for her tongue.
Andersen didn't have Christian as his middle name for nothing, and the story is suffused with Christian and Victorian ideals of the perfect woman as voiceless, passive and suffering quietly as she loyally serves a superior man. Unfortunately, he doesn't notice she's there. Her reward? Death and a great job opportunity: flying into homes as an invisible sprite and encouraging naughty children to deserve their parents' love. Pass the sick bag.
Andersen's misogyny has been subverted in Kneehigh's brilliant version of an equally unpleasant story, The Red Shoes, but whereas that giddy show turned the story on its head and used it as a metaphor for the choices that modern women make, Pam Gems's Mermaid stays much closer to the original except in the final scenes. As a feminist reclamation it does its best job on the Sea Witch, although even her bitchy nastiness is excused as the result of betrayed love.
Sue Parrish's production is most vivid in the first half, in which the seabed is an underwater playground of ropes, slides and trapezes, used to suggest a gliding weightlessness. After the interval the show veers towards panto. I may be wrong, but I suspect that the evening founders because it wants to be grown up but is worried about alienating a lucrative family audience. Personally I'd only want my daughters to see this if I thought they had aspirations to be the next Princess Diana.
· Until October 2. Box office: 020-8858 7755. Then touring.
