The teacher enters the classroom and writes on the board: "History (all of it). Discuss." Over the next 100 minutes the class do just that in the latest piece from Mapping4D, winner of this year's Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award, which aims to encourage risk-taking.
You can see why the award panel was seduced by the idea of a school history lesson as a metaphor for Britain's colonial past and present. As the balance of power established at the onset begins to shift, the classroom becomes a battle ground where the struggle for self-determination is played out.
Things begin well enough: on entering the classroom we are seated at rows of desks. A packet of sweets is shiftily passed around. The teacher's gradual loss of control, moving from firm but apparently fair authority figure to complete physical and mental wreck, is done well too. After 90 minutes the show builds to an effective climax as unrest in the Punjab in 1919, leading to the massacre at Amritsar, is re-enacted by the class, with desks opened to reveal ringing telephones and the English ruling class displaying typical mixture of pluck and downright stupidity and rushing around like headless chickens.
Unfortunately there is a lot of padding in between. The devising process seems to have encouraged verbal diarrhoea and while the show's format is in some ways innovative (audience participation is discouraged, so it is not as innovative as it might appear), its view of history is no more radical than you would find in the average A-level classroom. It is not long before the whole event starts to feel like a tedious double period of your least favourite subject.
· Until December 11. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
