What is tragedy? King Lear railing on the blasted heath? Six million dead in the Holocaust? An abused child alone in an empty room? The question is raised in the latest piece from Romeo Castellucci, a director whose unsettling, astonishing, enraging theatre is often as difficult to watch as a train crash, but cannot be easily ignored. In Tragedia Engogonidia, the past and present, memory and reality, the adult self and the child self collide in a world without hopeful resolution, where pools of blood gather under a child's prone body, a woman offers up her bottom and a man cuts off his tongue and feeds it to a cat.
These performances, as part of the London international festival of theatre, make up the ninth episode in a three-year dramatic cycle that is visiting 10 European cities and drawing on the socio-geographies of each. Apart from a couple of Union flags and some flock wallpaper, however, this episode is hardly representative of London. The strange, denuded, dazzling white or foggy interior could be from any time or place. Perhaps the family of cats that wandered across the stage at one point represented some thing more of the British psyche than I realised.
As a series of images Tragedia Endogonidia is fairly fascinating, and I was never for a moment bored. In fact, there is a bloody violence suppressed beneath the cool alabaster surface of the piece that is constantly intriguing. None the less, the show just didn't do it for me. At times it felt like a Howard Barker play staged with no script. With its laughing tinpot soldiers, there is something of the fairytale to it - and even of Alice in Wonderland. It sounds quite extraordinary, too. Scott Gibbons's music creates a sense of unease with its rumbles, pops and screams that feels as if it is happening inside your own head. But what does it all mean?
· Ends tomorrow. Box office: 020-7863 8012.
