There's a flock of sheep and a shepherd and, depending on your point of view, you might even witness a miracle in Julia Bardsley's Trans-Acts, which was full of suitably religious imagery for Easter. With an audience limited to 12, this performance, which opens the Spill festival, had more than a hint of the Last Supper.
Religion and theatre have a great deal in common: ritual, guilt, faith, transgressions and transformations. In Trans-Acts, Bardsley combined the two, and the result was a cross between Theatre of Blood and a Mass, the ridiculous and the mysteriously holy. An actress (shown only on video) made a spectacle of herself watched by a godlike director in a puke-green suit, which unzipped like a lizard skin. A devilish tiny tail peeped out of a pouch at the front of her suit like a furry little penis. Part installation, part exhibition and part performance, there were wounds like red velvet, a creepy ventriloquist's dummy, a suicidal Eve (more slipping on a banana than eating an apple) and falling angels. It sometimes seemed that Andrew Poppy's wonderful music ensured that the devil got all the best tunes. Bardsley's piece celebrates the transformations of theatre and makes you question everything you see. Look one way down a table laid with a series of wine glasses and you witness an accident ending in smashed glass. Look the other, and you are witnessing a miracle, something smashed rendered whole again.
I can believe in that. Bardsley eventually revealed the fakery, like a magician showing how her tricks are done. But the blood is genuine in Kira O'Reilly's Untitled (Syncope). You watch her score the crosses, one on each calf, with a scalpel and the blood drips down her legs into her scarlet high heels as she totters blindly around the space. Blood mingles with dirt; skin is mapped crimson. It feels so intimate, you want to look away. Or call an ambulance.
· Until April 17. Box office: 0870 429 6883.
