Sometimes you have to listen a CD for a while before you grow to like it. It can be like that with theatre too, as it is with this piece inspired by the Beatles' White Album, heralded by some as the most perfect rock album ever made. By the time of the record's release, the band was on the verge of splitting up, riven by internal tensions. Less than a year later, members of Charles Manson's "family" butchered the heavily pregnant Sharon Tate - wife of Roman Polanksi - and her friends in a Beverly Hills mansion. Daubed on the walls in blood were song titles from the White Album.
In Michael Pinchbeck's play these story strands combine with a third, a fictional love story etched in vinyl that tells of the doomed relationship of Julia and Miles, a man who really lets the needle get under his skin. Played out on a cubed, dazzling white set that mirrors the design of the album cover, the show is like a bad trip, a hallucination in the mind of Miles, who is dying from a broken heart and a drug overdose. Running through the tracks on the album - each song tells a story here - but not in sequential order, it is as if the needle keeps slipping in the groove.
This clever, ambitious show is one that you have to learn to like. It always keeps you at an emotional distance. It can be confusing, and sometimes feels too much like a private obsession, a kind of theatrical, blokeish Nick Hornby-style essay from writer Pinchbeck and director Giles Croft. Sometimes it is so exhaustingly busy and dazzlingly white that it makes you want to lie down with a wet flannel over your face. Yet I still found myself warming to its playful randomness and its attempt to respond to one piece of art by making another. Intriguing, yes; wholly enjoyable, perhaps not. Worth a look? Definitely.
· Until April 8. Box office: 0115-941 9419.
