Review: Canary, Hampstead Theatre

Well, here’s an opportunity missed. Canary is a brilliantly swirling, expansive and epic text that owes a great debt (perhaps too great a debt) to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Sadly, Hettie MacDonald’s production never tackles Jonathan Harvey’s play head on. It’s not that she’s misdirected the piece. Within her chosen style Macdonald has unravelled its complexities and told a byzantine time-and-space hopping narrative with admirable clarity. She’s given room to its history lesson without losing the determined outrage beneath. By doing just that, however, she has entirely bottled it.

Canary is a marble cake of flashbacks and fantasies stemming from the outing of Tom, the broad-shouldered chief of police now camped up at home with his wife, daughter and flamboyant face-off-t’-tele Russell. Outside the press are parked with flashbulbs poised. Fifty years of the past materialises in his living room: Tom’s teenage relationship with Billy in 1960’s Liverpool; Billy’s subsequent ‘treatment’ for homosexuality and campaigning with the Gay Liberation Front; Mary Whitehouse, miner’s strikes and Maggie Thatcher; Russell’s friendship with Tom’s AIDs-infected son; the deathbed reunion of father and son and, finally, the re-cultivation of Tom’s relationship with Billy, now incarcerated following his revenge on the doctor that administered his aversion therapy. The overshot is testimony to increased tolerance and its price, but also a warning against camp complacency. Harvey’s point is that, in spite of Section 28’s repeal, equal ages of consent and civil partnerships, there’s still work to be done.

It’s a choppy sea of scenes that crash into one another, overlapping and (super)imposing as if the timeline has flattened into simultaneity. Harvey compresses a hectic half-century with the strength of a car-crusher, leaving a dense bundle of contrasting attitudes and events.

MacDonald’s response to all this is to untangle. She tidies, sorting the individual threads into their own distinct space and labelling them clearly by upping the playing style to enable differentiation. The action of the past is dragged up to Beano-esque broadness to circumnavigate Harvey’s lampooning of Mary Whitehouse, played like Mrs Doubtfire by Phillip Voss, and Margaret Thatcher. It’s as if MacDonald can’t stomach mess and so refuses to allow a clash of playing styles. Where she juxtaposes two scenes, she sits them snugly side by side, as if for comparison. They never disrupt one another or do battle. Really, the whole spectrum needs to exist throughout as a cacophony, scenes clattering off each other like billiards balls.

Put another way, it’s all far, far too British. MacDonald’s direction is polite: all is done in reverend care of us. She guides us by the hand through what is a jagged, thorny knot – attempting to suggest location where she needn’t, spelling out the issues and wearing the moral indignation too showily. In doing so, she denies Harvey’s text its scale; she wimps out of its challenge (to both practitioner and spectator). That's not to say that Canary is scuppered. It's just not enough.

Review: A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, Lyric Hammersmith

A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky is (not) about the end of the world.

The multifarious members of the Benton family talk of cosmic tears in a universe coming apart at the seams. And yet the impending doom feels less significant than the inevitably doomed. That is to say that by offering a portrait of its end, Simon Stephens, Robert Holman and David Eldridge – writing collaboratively (more of which later) – have achieved a snapshot of the world as is. The view they offer, however, is not as we are accustomed to, but rather oddly detached from the usual order of things; a view that veers a little nearer to objectivity. The world presented is a world caught in amber, fossilised or frozen, filled with the remnants of a civilisation – our civilisation – on which we can reminisce fondly. It’s Pompeii all over again.

To that end, the trio have gathered together the fluff that collects in the tumble dryer of life and placed it in something akin to a gallery context. It’s like Duchamp’s Fontaine, only all-encompassing: the world as readymade, as an objet d’art.

There are two reasons for this skewing of expectations. Firstly, the apocalypse as shown in A Thousand Stars... is totally unfamiliar. It doesn’t conform to the end of the world as we envision it. Or rather, the close shave with the end of the world as Hollywood envisions it. Here, there are no panicked scientists and no scrambling politicians. There’s no Bruce Willis and there’s no Clarke Kent. Instead, there’s calm acceptance and rational reflection. We are accustomed to watching the world’s end while awaiting its very aversion. Here, it is “definitely going to happen”. As audience, we have to come to terms with that idea and exist alongside it. It provides a rare opportunity, by positing the end of all things, to consider their value. It allows us to realise that we’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Not, interestingly enough, the value of the overall. The second divergence from our usual perspective on the end of the world is the very absence of the world as a whole. The tragedy of the apocalypse is so often located in its scale. Vast numbers stretching into the billions are thrown about. As well as thinking about individuals – archetypal alpha males, pretty women and intelligent outsiders – we are invited to think of continents and oceans. A Thousand Stars... refuses to play by those rules. Instead we see only a family – admittedly a sprawling one consisting of a mother, five brothers, a wife, a daughter and a grandson (as well as a great-grandmother and great-grandfather glimpsed as ghosts/hallucinations). Thanks to the absolute sparseness of Jon Bausor’s empty stage (not space), the world – by which I probably mean settings, backgrounds, landscapes or locations – remains unseen, already erased, already forgotten. Instead, all we see are people and things: a tin bath, a window, a train carriage, a dog, pyjamas, Johnson’s shampoo, cheese, marijuana, whiskey. It is these things that we hanker for, that we develop fond nostalgia for. And also family; those that we love are inevitably called to mind by those onstage.

In many ways, then, this is not about the end of all things, but rather the end of one’s own experience of those things. It is clearly set in the present. Fabio Capello is on the back page of the paper heralding the end. (Even in the face of the apocalypse, sports fans must be satisfied.) Those things, therefore, are already familiar to us. A Thousand Stars... invites us to see them as if for the last time. As such, it feels more about the idea – almost a magically realist hypothesis – that, by sheer chance, every individual’s death were to coincide precisely.

As a story, it’s remarkably simple. In the face of the world’s end, a family regroups. In doing so, they achieve reconciliation in the face of a shared fate. One of the brother’s doesn’t make it, dying of cancer days before. His niece opts out, rejecting the trip to Middlesborough. Together they watch the world’s death, staring skywards as the stars become supernovae and consume them.

That story is treated almost in segments, with scenes functioning as interconnected vignettes. There’s a lot left unseen as the narrative hops through both time and space. By virtue of circumventing potential potholes for plausibility, that's a savvy choice, but it does bring with it the feeling of a spider diagram. You can pretty much see the mind map collected by the collective, drawn up on their shared wallpaper. It's a list of stuff about which to tug our heartstrings. Perhaps alongside that there’s a niggling frustration with the obviousness of those items: cancer and ice-cream, for example. As much as it's odd to offer a diagnosis of process based on product (we’d never say, for example, “Stoppard was clearly distracted when he wrote scene two”), it feels as if the three writers have forcibly kept themselves on the same page. There’s no sense of the oddities that come from momentary misunderstandings in collaboration, from the gap between two, or three, minds. Stylistically too, the direct, detached mode of text – jarringly frank and objective – feels the result of a contract between them: an agreement of a voice in order than none of their individual voices override the collaboration. Stephens, Holman and Eldridge are, it seems, writing by a set of rules.

Not that I’m complaining. I grew very fond of the piece’s style and tone, both as a text and in production. Others didn’t and I can understand that. It doesn’t quite feel like drama. We’re used to sleight of hand, to the revelation of the concealed, to reading the tides beneath the text. Try to watch A Thousand Stars... in light of those expectations and it looks immature and flat: “GCSE drama,” as the couple in front of me put it. But it’s far, far cleverer than that. In admitting its failure in the face of an impossible task, it allows us to overlook its staged nature in our own time.

Take, for example, the scene in which cancer-sufferer William Benton (Nigel Cooke) is bathed, very slowly – pretty much in real time – by his mother (Ann Mitchell) and younger brother (Harry McEntire). Cooke stands naked before us, a pained grimace gripping his face, and is gently washed thoroughly, such that no part of him goes unwiped. The scene’s bravado of length allows us to come to terms with the bravado of its content, such that both real and fiction can comfortably co-exist. Where others would succumb to distraction, the real invading the fiction, the honesty of Sean Holmes’ production allows the latter to overpower the former and the result is incredibly moving.

Perhaps there is a worry about the scenario’s role in the directness of the text. In the face of the world’s end, with consequences of little import, the text is often reflexive. It is about coming to terms with the past and about honesty in the moment. That the characters are family often allows them to dispense with civil niceties and speak openly. It’s like they’ve cut the meaningless extras. If something gets said, it needs saying. I suspect that results in too high a level of self-awareness on the part of the characters. They see themselves pretty much as we see them. At one point Harry McEntire’s Philip Benton announces, “These are the things I’ve discovered about the world.” You can’t help but wonder what he hasn’t realised that he’s learnt, what he’s picked up unconsciously, yet the style of the text doesn’t really allow for that. It so concern with the oppositions of the experienced and the never-to-be-experienced. In fact, there’s a nagging concern that such diametric juxtapositions take over: tried vs. achieved, courage vs. cowardice, wasted inertia/hedonism vs. sober alertness/appreciation.

Small matter, though, in an accomplished piece that offers a rare space for rarefied reflection. Yes, there are fine performances, particular from Cooke, McEntire and Pearce Quigley, in a superb production composed of interesting, appropriate decisions in Sean Holmes’ direction and Jon Bausor’s design. Leave the theatre and you’ll find its infiltrated your perception – if you’ve let it work. The bits and pieces that clutter the square, the people on the tube, take on the same quality as objet d’art to be looked on with a strange mixture of fondness and sadness. A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, for all its quaintness, is theatre that makes you re-evaluate, even if that newfound valuation fades with the return of life’s normal pattern. Often it takes the extra-ordinary to make you see afresh.

Review: This Story of Yours, Old Red Lion

Written for Time Out

Newly-formed barefaced productions exists, in part, to revive forgotten classics. For all the skill, verve and intelligence evidenced by their full-length debut, however, they have forgotten to ask why.

First produced in 1968, John Hopkins' This Story of Yours is a well-crafted examination of police brutality. In it, an old-fashioned copper comes a cropper after beating a suspected paedophile to death. However, after programmes like Life on Mars, that scenario has become almost family-friendly. Certainly, Hopkins' play lacks the pointed resonance of Sus (recently revived by the Young Vic) and his connection of institutionalised and domestic violence seems both hackneyed and tame by modern standards.

Yet though this may be a museum piece, you'll struggle to find many better productions of this jaded text and London's fringe rarely manages so much with so little. Anthony Biggs directs with nuanced dexterity, stringing smart yet subtle connections throughout. Thanks to Cherry Truluck's (underused) Escheresque set and Laurence J. Horstman's audio, Biggs musters a head-swirling mix of tinnitus and nausea.

Review: Boom Bang-a-bang, Etcetera Theatre

Written for Time Out

Given Jonathan Harvey's farcical potboiler revolves around the Eurovision Song Contest, cheapness dictates a verdict of 'nul points' evidenced with a quip about a production that has less beneath its surface than Bucks Fizz ever did. Such a shallow gesture, however, would only match About Turn's desperation to please, which, by prostituting itself for laughter, deserves none.

For all that it veers towards the improbable in its final moments, Harvey's script warrants being taken seriously. His camp collection - all of whom have gathered in recently bereaved Lee's Kentish Town flat to watch Love City Groove conquer the continent - is finely balanced to enable volatility and vulnerability among the wisecracking one-liners, but director Marc Nykolyszyn refuses to trust in the material. Instead he elevates mincing over motivation, steering a childish course that risks offending with its crassness.

By making no effort to root the play in its period or to realise the pain of its individual characters, Nykolyszyn reduces Harvey's text to shoddy pantomime. Moreover, in starting so large, he leaves the chaos no room to escalate beyond barked shouts and caps-lock acting. Essentially, this 'Boom Bang-a-Bang' is all too ba-dum-tish.

Instructions for Audience Transformation

I came across the following in a book I've just started and thought it worth sharing. It's an extract from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's manifesto for performance The Variety Theatre, written in 1913 and its far too long for Twitter.

"Introduce surprise and the need to move among the spectators of the orchestra, boxes and balcony. Some random suggestions: spread a powerful glue on some of the seats, so that the male or female spectator will stay glued down and make everyone laugh (the damaged frock coat or toilette will naturally be paid for at the door) - sell the same ticket to ten people: traffic jam, bickering, and wrangling. - offer free tickets to gentlemen or ladies who are notosiously unbalanced, irritable, or eccentric and likely to provoke uproars with obscene gestures, pinching women, or other freakishness. Sprinkle the seats with dust to make people itch and sneeze, etc."

The whole thing is worth a read, but I'm also quite fond of the following advice:

"Systematically prostitute all of classic art on the stage, performing for example all the Greek, French and Italian tragedies condensed and comically mixed up, in a single evening - put life into the works of Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, Bellini, Chopin by inserting Neopolitan songs - put Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Zacconi, Mayol, and Fregoni side by side on the stage - play a Beethoven symphony backward, beginning with the last note - boil all of Shakespeare down to a single act - do the same with all the most venerated actors - have actors recite Hernani tied in sacks up to their necks - soap the floorboards to cause amusing tumbles at the most tragic of moments."

Though there's a tone somewhere between angry zest and jest, its interesting to note quite how much of this second extract has come to pass. I'm reminded of the Reduced Shakespeare Company and of Beckett, of Rupert Goold and Katie Mitchell, of Ostermeier and Purcarete (of whom I've only read), of the Wooster Group's annihilation of La Didone and of Forced Entertainment's Bloody Mess. In fact, doesn't Marinetti sound just like Tim Etchells?

Review (of sorts): Love the Sinner, National Theatre

Drew Pautz’s play trips you up, but it does so less with a calculated outstretched leg as with a stumble of its own that happens to drag you down, domino-stylee, with it. It opens onto a rectangular table around which sit a swarm of sweat-soaked clergymen. To judge from the soft scowls of tempered impatience, the conference has proved lengthy even before the current impasse in which the local African contingent are refusing to conform to the more liberal attitudes of their European and American counterparts. Coffee is called for and delivered by a hotel porter, greeted by the congregation with their eyes shut. Just as you think you’re in for an evening of comical clerical squabbling – ‘The Vic of It’, if you will (or, with thanks to Andrew Haydon, 'Yes, Ministers') – Love the Sinner picks up the story of a man slouched in the corner taking minutes.

That man is Michael (Jonathan Cullen), a volunteer whom we next see in a stand-off with the very same hotel porter, Joseph (Fiston Barek). Pretty soon, it becomes apparent that missionary hasn’t been Michael’s only position on the trip and he’s held to ransom as Joseph bids to emigrate for Britain. Back in Blighty by scene three, Michael’s marriage seems to be unfurling, as an argument over a squirrel infestation spirals into his devotion – both to her and bible studies – and, finally, their childlessness.

In the second act, Joseph has – inevitably – turned up. We find out indirectly, in the middle of Michael’s meeting with three employees at his envelope manufacturing firm, when his wife arrives, shellshocked, with the question “Who’s Joseph?” It is a question that goes unanswered, or rather, unsatisfactorily answered. Then, lo, by scene five, it has come to pass that Joseph is living in the basement of Michael’s parish church, where he is discovered by Stephen (Ian Redford), the highest ranking of the church leaders of scene 1, and his PR man Daniel (Scott Handy). Michael returns with groceries, confesses all to this private congregation, pleading Joseph’s case for shelter both in the church and the country as a whole. Stephen offers sympathy, but little by way of support. Daniel tries to avoid potential scandal. Joseph, eventually, heads upstairs and makes his (and Michael’s) confession public.

Writing the above, I’m struck by quite how much is missing. It feels desperately incomplete, not only stripped of detail, but also twisted into formation. As synopses go, the above certainly doesn’t feel neat and yet, it has trimmed Pautz’s play – which is teeming with offshoots, asides, loose ends and stray hairs – into some form of shape. He has so much to say that his argument becomes a jumbled, all-inclusive, unfocused attack and, as Oxbridge tutors tell students with finals approaching, what you leave out matters more than what you put in. It feels as if Pautz is so determined to find the Church – even organised religion or faith itself – guilty that he scuppers his case by throwing in every possible accusation.

Alongside this, there’s a problem with his storyboarding. The five scenes sit independently. Yes, there is a route through, but each feels like it could fit into another narrative plot. There’s a sense of Connect Four about it. This particular through-line is one of many possibles. Pautz could just as well have opted for a line that intersects it vertically or diagonally. Accordingly, there is very little narrative thrust to Love the Sinner. It never really gains momentum enough to tumble out of control.

In fact, by way of demonstration. One need only look at the opening scene; the conference. In terms of the plot, this opening scene serves very little purpose. It establishes that Michael went to Africa, that he did so attached to a Christian mission and that he is not himself a member of the clergy. It allows us a glimpse of Joseph and, crucially (though I missed the moment myself) it allows Michael a glimpse of him, while those around him keep their eyes shut. I guess that signifies Michael’s weakness, the imperfection of the everyman in giving in to temptation. In a way, though, one gets all of that from the second scene (and beyond). What else? Well, plot-wise it establishes Stephen’s authority and Daniels man-management, but very little else. Its function is clearly to carry the message, a foreword serving a frame of reference.”How do we remain current as well as truthful?” This clash of universality and specificity is also couched in geographical terms – pre-empting the asylum question that will emerge later (and well realised in the ubiquity of Anna Flieschle’s set, which refolds bland beige panels into various formations to achieve different locations, like a monotone Rubiks Cube). In other words, Pautz feels the need to stage the debate in order that we can spot it throughout the rest of his play. It’s a little heavy-handed, no?

For all that, though, it’s far from a dispiriting watch. It’s quite enjoyable as it goes along, only seeming unsatisfactory after the event itself. There’s plenty of room for the cast and director to play, providing hilariously observed (and executed) characters and some strong set pieces. Certainly, it’s funny, but possibly at the expense of emotional draw. By the time Michael and Joseph make their confessions, you’re not terribly bothered about what awaits them, which probably has to do with the seeming arbitrariness of scenes and storyline.

How to characterise the piece in terms of what it does, then, rather than what it doesn’t?

Well, it’s closest to the 'little-man-caught-in-the-middle-of-the-insoluble' mould. In Cullen’s hands, Michael seems a beta-male given an alpha-role in his own story. That makes him perfect sit-com fare, a role Cullen suits very well. Think of Gordon Brittas, Basil Faulty or David Brent, none of whom are quite equipped to deal with their situation. Michael is a modern day Job, tried and tried again, but plodding onwards, bumbling through life “trying to do right by everyone.” Events are out of his control.

One could even look at Love the Sinner as a story of inopportune knocks. In each scene, a closed system is interrupted by an unwanted rap at the door. First, its Joseph bearing coffee to the conference. Second, it’s Daniel stepping into the hotel room. Then, the pest-control man in scene three, Shelley in scene four (who reports the clatter of stones on her window thrown by Joseph, who later knocks on the door of their home) and, in turn, Michael’s colleagues interrupt their attempt at spur of the moment sex. In the final scene, it is the unwanted intrusion of a church party touring the building.

Perhaps all this is simply Pautz using a device to move the play forward, but it is surely overused were that the case. Rather it seems to suggest a certain determinism; that life has its own plans and faith can never be more than a responsive tool. We are not in control and nor should we aspire to be so. Nor, sadly, is Pautz himself.

Review: Daniel Deronda, Upstairs at the Gatehouse

written for Time Out

Even on the page, George Eliot's last novel is notoriously problematic. It runs two plots concurrently, rarely allowing them to entwine, and displays little neatness of narrative as it flashes back and forth through time. All of which comes with a hefty discourse on the Zionist vision in tow.

John Cooper's adaptation is no match for its knotty tangle. In fact, he hits almost every hazard of literary adaptation, pruning the text down to a skeletal synopsis that hops through events as if ticking off a checklist. So concerned is Cooper with minimising length that he strips his project of purpose, leaving himself no time for interrogation and bleaching Eliot's text of politics and psychology. This is show-and-tell stuff, splurging backstory so we see not characters by conglomerations of biographical bullet points.

Without playing Cooper's text for the melodrama it is, director Harry Meacher and his cast can do little to circumvent its problems. Instead, Meacher gives us Cranford-lite. Credit to Lee Ravitz and, as an elegantly boyish Deronda, Mark Jackson for bringing life to the lifeless.

For the most part, though, the cast look bored. Little wonder, really, given a foolhardy venture that combines the authenticity of Madame Tussauds with the electricity of Spark's Notes.

Review: Dirty White Boy, Trafalgar Studios

Written for Time Out

“Honey,” says Angie, “I am Soho!” Given she’s a post-op transsexual with new bits that resemble Cheddar Gorge, you can see her point, but Soho is not as easily reducible as all that. Where Clayton Littlewood’s blog – a diary of his two years running the titular shop on a Dean Street corner – succeeds in capturing the phantasmagoria at the heart of W1, this naive stage adaptation filters out the flotsam and sets up a handful of regulars as normative. Here, however, baby and bathwater are one and the same.

Alongside Angie, there’s Chico – a moneyed American with a rent boy in constant tow – and veteran eccentric Sohoites, Leslie and Charlie, who rekindle their relationship with a little nudge from Clayton.

Narrating proceedings, Littlewood is quietly likeable providing flashes of flair in his beady-eyed observations. David Benson goes at the accompanying caricatures with gusto, finding humour at the expense of detail. Phil Willmott’s over-literal direction means the whole thing trundles along with amiable mediocrity.

Until, that is, Alexis Gerred – a fresh-faced pop-bot utterly incapable of irony – reappears with another limply delivered and frankly embarrassing musical interlude. For a moment, Soho looks as deviant as Disneyland.

Review: Psy, Peacock Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Let’s be honest, Psy isn’t going to win prizes for its groundbreaking exploration of mental health issues. Its line-up of kooks and fruit-loops are characterised with all the complexity of an amateur production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. From the whooping manic to the blank-faced amnesiac via a self-scratching addict, each of the various conditions is played exactly as one would expect. In fact, it comes dangerously close to disrespecting its subject by turning mental illness into a string of easy gags. Whisper it, but we’re not supposed to do that these days...

Let’s be honest, though, that’s not why you’ve come to Psy, is it? And, though it might nag at you a little afterwards (the whole PC thing really is deeply indoctrinated), it doesn’t affect your enjoyment of what is – from first to last – an astonishing piece of circus that manages to interrogate the form without sacrificing the slightest sniff of populism.

Essentially, each of the various disorders is twinned with a particular traditional circus act, such that the red-eyed insomniac slides perilously down a Chinese pole and the addict is encircled in the tumble of a German wheel. In many ways the show becomes topsy-turvy. Rather than the circus revealing something about its subject, the subject reveals the nature of the individual apparatus. A quality of a particular feat is drawn out and brought to the fore. Here, we spot the exhilaration behind the German wheel, the way it traps the performer in a seductive pas de deux, the downwards spiral, the speed, the blur, the headrush. Or else we spot the simple pleasure of seeing objects anew, detached from purpose, as the juggling amnesiac picks up his clubs and starts to play.

It is all phenomenally directed by Shana Carroll, who understands that to showcase a single performer is no longer enough to grip us. Instead, individual acts become centrepieces, surrounded by echoes and ripples. As Florent LeStage swirls clubs above his head, another performer chews newspaper and spits it into the air, mirroring the movement in a subtly delightful way. Nor does Carroll constantly aim for the most complex, daring choreography. There is an elevation of simplicity that respects the apparatus, tuning into the motion at its core and emphasising it with a clever mix of synchronicity, stillness and counter-motion. It is delights the eyes as frequently as it enraptures the heart.

Beyond this, Les 7 Doigts de la Main has banished the self-satisfied aloofness that so often accompanies circus in a bid to boost its sex appeal. The pouting catwalk chic is instead replaced with personality – often even goofiness – that brings a different attraction. Here there is something more cutely fanciable than detachedly gawp-worthy. It’s as playful as a wink, full of wit and kooky charisma.

All of which confirms Les 7 Doigts... as one of the brightest sparks in world circus. Psy truly is mindblowing.

Review: Would Like To Meet, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Serendipity. That’s what’s at the heart of every good rom-com. Being in the right place, at the right time. Catching the right eyes across a crowded room. Finding the right words tripping off your tongue. Owning the right bookshop in Notting Hill. Hiring the right prostitute in Hollywood. Slipping through the right set of sliding doors.

Would Like to Meet plays with that same sense of serendipity. A pre-recorded audiotour for six individual participants, each of whom takes a different route through the Barbican complex, it sets up a series of fleeting meetings – or rather, half-meetings – with the precision of a master watchmaker. We are guided and instructed by the sort of anonymous voice that comes as standard in this kind of work: it’s crisp yet soft, well-spoken and lush to the point of slight flirtation. At times the various paths interlock, weaving in and out of one another’s way, sometimes within touching distance, sometimes across an expanse of space.

Where they converge, it feels like a chance encounter, happy happenstance. It feels like something could happen. Something real. Something meaningful. Life-changing, even.

Only it doesn’t. At no point, in fact, does WLTM allow an acquaintance to develop into anything more manifest. In fact, most of the encounters en route remain notably incomplete, defined by some absence or other: a note left on an empty coffee cup; a secret passed to an unseen stranger; a silhouette watched from the other side of a moat. Mostly we see hands, legs and backs of heads – as disembodied as the voice in our ears. Even where we see a whole person, the interaction is ticklishly minimal: it’s a gaze held across the length of a hallway, it’s shoulders not quite brushing as you pass on the stairs, it’s two backs touching across a bench. All the time, you are aware of others (sometimes another participant, sometimes a performer), but they remain anonymous enough that an ideal – your ideal – comes to stand in for them. It is a process of extrapolation. A perfect partner is constructed from existent fragments.

At one point, for example, I found myself in a telephone booth, conducting a conversation via post-it notes displayed over the top of the partition. The voice asks who I’m told I look like, who I would like to look like. Prince William. Above, a yellow square appears with ‘Michelle Pfieffer (and Tom from Keane)’ scribbled on it. And there we are, in adjacent cubicles in any old corner of London: her, a sleek, golden-haired film star and me, an eligible, square-jawed prince.

In this, WLTM is an extension of the city itself. It plays on that open secret of urban existence: the city as breeding ground, as a dense gathering of potential soul-mates, each passing one another by as they go. Here, non zero one allow those crossings to linger a little longer. They let you glimpse a little more and entertain the thought of something further still, something fuller, before snapping you away as per usual. It all comes to nothing, but it came so close. This is where the romance exists. It could have been something. We could have had something.

How does it feel? Exciting, ticklish, titillating. It creates the same buzz – the same electric flicker of adrenaline – that occurs when an awaited text message flies in. It makes a butterfly house of your stomach and a lily-pad of your throat. Besides, the rules aren’t the same. We’re allowed to play, we’re asked to break the usual conventions of public space: banisters can be slid down, silence can be broken. Perhaps, then, moves can be made and things can happen.

But then, every now and then, just at the point where you might get wrapped up in the fantasy, you snag on the contrivance of it all. After all, it’s little wonder that you’ve happened across the right place at the right time: the whole thing is constructed as such, to be just so. This is not serendipity, but the work of a skilled puppeteer. What seems to materialise in the moment is, in fact, meant to be, mechanised – to the extent that you recognise your responsibility to the experiences of others. Your journey is nothing but a monorail, a sightseeing tour moving at its own pace, entirely as it pleases. “Look to your left and you’ll see this. Look right, that."

Is that problematic? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, a large part of the joy is giving yourself over to the instructing voice, submitting to its whims and being relieved of the burden of decision. That submission is not forced, but enticed. It’s carrot as opposed to stick. While there is ample reward for your compliance in the various set pieces encountered en route, the very challenge of following instructions is, in itself, quietly pleasing. It’s as if you are seeking to gratify this voice, or maybe just to succeed, to get it right.

However, like many companies working with audio-instructed performance and interactivity, non zero one claim that their work seeks an active audience. Embedded within this, of course, is the notion that sitting down, watching something in the dark is a passive experience – perhaps necessarily so. I’m not so sure I agree, but I shan’t go into that here. I will say, however, that WLTM is, in many ways, a passive experience.

In the programme notes, the company write, “Power is placed in the hands of the audience, enabling them to become authors of their own event.” But really, what power have we got? Yes, we have the power to disobey, but to do so is to derail the train. It is an act of fruitless destruction. It is simply to say, like Bartleby the Scrivener, “I prefer not.”

There exists a set path and, where we have made the decision to obey, we follow it. In what way, then, do we “become authors of [our] own event?” Admittedly, there are moments of choice, such as (in my case) the particularities of the secret written down (and later passed to an anonymous stranger) or the message you leave for another to find. My point is that in these instances what is written is less important than the fact that it is written. The titillation is in (apparently) stumbling across a note, rather than stumbling across this note. It is no different to finding a coin left, presumably, by another participant. The note is just some words. The secret is just a confession (or a lie). The coin is just a coin.

We are just some person. Anyone else would do.

Ok, so none of this is overly problematic in terms of the experience itself, but it is a consideration that the audiotour form as a whole must take into account at some stage. I raise it now because WLTM is a robust little piece on its own terms. However, where audio-instructed work has managed to open itself out – Rider Spoke and Wondermart spring to mind – the gains are far greater. Here, the boundaries are too strongly felt, there is not the freedom that truly makes something interactive. It is, in other words, too gentle, too safe, never really demanding more of you than soft sentiment and a wispy grin. Which, really, is all it ever sets out to acheive, so it feels a touch harsh to hold that against the piece.

More problematic is the evident juxtaposition of actors and passers-by. The waiter role, for example, feels particularly artificial. It also seems a shame that all six participants start from the same spot, as it rather diminishes the intrigue and mystery of the unfamiliar stranger you keep bumping into. I also wonder whether the work has the ability to surprise. For some reason I found myself trying to figure it out, like a magician’s trick, and second guess its next move. Just as the gun hanging on a wall in act one will go off in act five, the dramaturgy of the journey is a little bit predictable. Write a secret and you know someone’s going to find out.

These are, however, detailed quibbles about what is a lovely experience, albeit one that will not survive a trace of cynicism. Just like a rom-com then.