I am all for unusual theatrical journeys but this hour-long Thames night cruise, conceived by Swedish installation artists Carina Reich and Bogdan Szyber and presented by the London International Festival of Theatre, takes you for a ride in every sense.
You board a cruiser at Bermondsey and chug up the river towards Tate Modern. As you sit below deck, London's bridges, landmarks and warehouses glow romantically in the fading light. Ministered to by a pair of eerie attendants who dispense hot milk and blankets, you listen through headphones to a faintly risible prose poem by Bjorner Torsson, droningly read by Linda Marlowe. It dwells on the mystery and danger of water, the shadow world beneath the waves and the fear that we may be progressing across the river Styx towards death.
Listening to this somnolent nonsense, I was reminded of a genuinely dramatic dream that starts in the Tower, which we pass on our journey, and ends on the Styx: Clarence's great speech in Richard III. You have only to compare Clarence's underwater vision of "a thousand men that fishes gnawed upon" with Torsson's talk of "a mirror-world of decay and sorrow" to see the difference between a graphically concrete image and a woozily vague sentiment. And, while the technical term for this form of theatre is "site-specific", I would dub this "site-imprecise". Conceived for the Swedish waterways, it had nothing much to do with the Thames.
I enjoyed the trip itself but, not for the first time, I was struck by the faux-naiveté that accompanies so much would-be consciousness-expanding theatre. We are meant to be ooh-so-scared when black blinds come down on the windows or fluorescent strips light up red to suggest impending death. You'd have to be a very tiny child indeed to feel a frisson of terror. All the evening really did was remind me what scandalously little use we make, for either transport or pleasure, of the Thames. However, as an attempt to play on our primal fears or explore our hidden depths, it was a bit of a damp squib.
Until June 23. Box office: 020-7863 8017.21
