PROJECT C ON PRINCIPLE. To 13 March.

London

PROJECT C ON PRINCIPLE
created by Matthew Dunster, Tracy O'Flaherty, Drew Pautz, Jim Pyke, Alice Selwyn, Liz White

bac (Studio 2) To 13 March 2005
Tue-Sat 8.30pm Sun 6.30pm
Runs 2hr 10min One interval

TICKETS: 020 7223 2223
www.bac.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 6 March

Watch out there's a show about.When a subject's in the zeitgeist it attracts all art-forms. There's overlapping, and repetition (art-forms are as subject to derivatives as anything else). Yet social, especially urban, paranoia is so integral to modern times that an inventive piece like this from The Work makes for a fascinating flutter round the theme.

Fears and anxieties play on each other here. Terry latches on to Lauren, compulsively protecting her from unrealised dangers, satisfying his own anxieties more than hers (she has few enough till he's around). She's into security, the only trade where people can feel they've a handle on things - until the super-league credit card bellyflops in a terminal-governed society.

While Jim Pyke's Terry runs consistently through the action, hand on disconnected earpiece albeit taking on such guises as children's clown at Britain-based US ex-pats Lauren and husband's Thanksgiving party Tracy O Flaherty doubles Lauren and Croatian dancer Katja.

She's someone who should be worrying - there's guilt in her past and the piece ends with a quiet conversation in Croatian, aptly shutting the audience out on a serious note.

Yet Katja's mixed up in Nick's comic-level angst-fest. He claims to runs a building. He does; it's a theatre and devising a pan-Euro multi-arts celebration he gets the hassle anyone might expect from such an enterprise, Katja's unwillingness to perform, over-zealous artist-waitress Rebecca's intrusive keenness. The show works by implication, nagging at audience uncertainties over links; someone's run-over crossing the road for a sandwich. Another person practises falling, then makes a claim to a similar accident.

Anna Fleischle's grey, anonymous set opens up myriad compartments, secrets of the set manipulated by cords and handles, as these characters feel themselves at the mercy of others known or unknown. Perhaps significantly the happiest character is a recovered addict set up as a dog-walker. Despite the Liverpool accent (shorthand for working-class simplicity?), her only bane's an ex-partner. For the others, too much intelligence about Intelligence is their undoing in a devised show which has the combination of pace and construction so many such pieces lack.

Katja/Lauren: Tracy O'Flaherty
Terry: Jim Pyke
Rebecca/Sam: Alice Selwyn
Julia: Natasha Seale
Bob/Nick: Ian Dunn

Director: Drew Pautz
Designer: Anna Fleischle

2005-03-08 14:43:28