Written for Time Out
A drama school exercise let loose in the real world, Vaughan Pilikian's devised theatrical leper colony ought never to have had an audience plonked in front of it.
Six performers, surrounded by random junk, improvise madness. They grunt, growl and tic, squabble and smash things. Then they lose interest and do something else, always with scant regard for those watching. An hour in, they pretend to sleep, 'wake up' and act like zombies; deep breathing, bestial rutting and so forth.
Leper Colony is undisciplined, unstructured and, due to its fatal lack of specificity, meaningless. Presumably it concerns repressed savagery and the precariousness of civilisation. Who knows? Who cares? This sort of thing was done in the '70s, and I assume it was just as empty, indulgent and tiresome then.
There is some good news: Leper Colony is intended to mark the Transit of Venus, so we're not due a sequel until 2117.
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