Teatro Vivo have a gift for disrupting the flow of everyday life with their theatrical interventions in supermarkets or on city streets. But it’s ghosts that disrupt their new show, which is being staged in private homes and spaces around both the New Cross Gate and Hither Green areas in south-east London.
The premise is simple: the audience arrive for a viewing of a property with an estate agent, Amelia, who is under pressure from her boss to make a sale. But we have barely inspected the living room before things starts to go bump in the night. In this rapidly changing area, there should be much to explore as the ghosts begin to rise and the past casts a shadow over the present.
We meet some of the people who have lived here, from elderly Jeff to a young pregnant woman about to be evicted – and the piece is at its best when embedded in the history of the area, such as the bombing of Woolworths on the New Cross Road in 1944. But instead of mining this rich seam, fictional characters from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District are thrown into the mix. It loses focus, leaving the actors and the audience floundering in an increasingly dull, puzzling and overextended evening.
• Until 3 December. Box office: 020-8692 4446.
