"Help. I am being held captive here. Please take me with you when you go home. This is my only chance. Please help me." I don't know how this note appeared on the table in front of me. One minute it wasn't there, the next it was - just one of the many surprises in the Dende Collective's bizarre and mostly engaging theatre piece.
Inspired by short stories by mid-20th century Brazilian writer Murilo Rubiao, The Piranha Lounge transports you to a small, seedy private club, an eat-or-be-eaten world peopled by monsters and butterflies, the happy and the seriously desperate, the beautiful and the damned, where heaven and hell seem to coexist and it is hard to tell the difference between the living and the dead. Are the inhabitants of the Piranha Lounge only ghosts? If they are, what does that make us, the audience?
If they are ghosts, they are certainly colourful. There is Alfredo, the doorman, in love with cross-dressing singer Lola, the sadistic double-dealing mistress of the card table, Petunia, and Cobra, who has left her husband for a dragon. All the while you wonder: why are these people here? Are they real or tricks of the mind? Are they here because they want to be - or because, like the anonymous writer of the note, they are being held against their will?
If the evening falls short of being fantastic, it is because both acting and staging are ragged and the show relies too much on its oddity value than on a sharp script. But it is an enjoyable celebration of theatre and life's possibilities, and it takes you so completely into another world that you depart the theatre blinking as if awakening from a very strange dream.
· Until February 22. Box office: 020-7582 7680 .
