Rocinante! Rocinante!

On reading the blurb for this, it’s easy to become awestruck with the sheer ambition of this play – we’re promised a “surreal poetic tale in grotesque style” – hang on, surreal or grotesque? Then we’re told it’s the outcome of a “research project on theatre, music, visual art and psychiatry” - hmmm, OK. Then when we learn that it is a collaboration between a theatre group, two universities and an academic, which reference Hamlet and Don Quixote, it’s all too easy to conjure up visions of spoilt broth, and an excess of cooks.

Unfortunately, this attempt at translating some psychological science into theatre (to paraphrase Panta Rei Theatre) has too many influences pulling it in too many directions. Unchecked by proper guidance, the end result often looks more like an early-rehearsal workshop than a finished piece.

If there’s any reason to take off hats, it is to congratulate the cast for pulling off the superbly staged intermittent set-pieces which requires physical and mental dexterity and a lot of accuracy. However, the acts framed therein left me bewildered and frankly bored. If some of the message is in the medium and I was meant to feel something akin to insanity, then that aspect at least worked. But there is something self-defeating about doing this at the price of the plot and the remotest sympathy we may have with any characters.