There used to be an enterprising theatre company that performed to travellers on the London underground. Today they would probably be thrown off for begging, ignored by weary commuters or simply fail to find a place to perform in the packed carriages.
You rather regret their demise watching writer Louise Warren and director Helena Uren's attempt to bring alive the history beneath our feet in one of the final offerings in the Steam Industry's generally excellent London season at the Finborough. It is set in the imaginary and long-deserted Finborough Road, once an outpost on the Circle Line.
Warren and Uren's piece is billed as "a text installation with sound and performance", which sounds rather exciting. It turns out to be a glorified and not particularly chilling ghost story performed by a single actor with help from a tube train sound effect. The radio does this kind of thing better.
There is a want of imagination here. The Finborough theatre may be one flight up but it wouldn't take much to transform its already coffin-like space into a station several hundred feet underground. This production doesn't even get the sounds right; how much better the whole thing could have been if it were performed completely in the dark.
But the real difficulty is that the text is too brief and insubstantial to sustain either meaning or atmosphere, and ends just when you think it might be about to really get going. The premise is simple: we are in one of London's disused or "ghost" underground stations. The ghosts become more tangible as Michael Andrews's underground worker recounts stories from the past that interconnect like the tube tunnels and London's underground rivers, sometimes with disastrous consequences - as with the flash flood that wreaked havoc in the 1930s, killing those waiting for a Circle Line train.
As a reminder of London's hidden history and secret thoroughfares, the piece is entertaining enough and there are moments when the writing has a chilly power. But the individual stories are never more than snippets. The tale of the soldier who swapped the trenches for the tunnels of the underground and was never seen again is a full-length play or novel, but is thrown away here.
Michel Andrews has real presence as the underground worker with a yarn to spin but, quite honestly, you'd probably find out more about the underground and human nature (it would certainly take you longer) by going for a spin on the Circle Line. At £3.40 return, it would actually be cheaper too.
Until December 9. Box office: 020-7373 3842.
