"Without Blood" (The Place, 6 June)

Two people talk, listlessly and in wall-to-wall cliches. They are sitting at a table. A child walks slowly around a room. Occasionally, the child sings. Performed by the cast as though on thorazine--and who could blame them, given dialogue indistinguishable from the inner life of a coma patient? So slow as to produce waves of recuperative thinking: sometimes I thought the dullness meant something; most of the time, I assumed it was just dullness. The audience has much time to imagine the parade of brutalist performance venues this will dutifully tread through: the Brussels Municipal Theatre! The Prague Annex for Culture and Community Development! Your university's Arts Centre! 

A dense slab of ponderous Euro theatre--exquisitely dull without being, you know, exquisitely dull. I'm a huge proponent of grant-supported art, but occasionally the utter disdain for audience or interest produces something like this: something with no conceivable life outside of subsidy and enforced attendance. It looked as though someone had made their performance class attend, and I could pretty much imagine the class discussion by theme: violence (bad), sex (potentially redemptive), footprints on stage (blandly symbolic). Funny old world, innit, where someone who once shot someone's father and that someone can sit down together and talk stiltedly to one another? And all of this narrated in the third person by the characters, lest anything happen.

In fact, let's talk about the sex. Say you're a woman whose father is shot in front of her; who then hides in a tunnel; who is then given to a pedophile pharmacist; who is then sold in a poker game to a Count; who is then made to produce three sons; who then takes the father-shooter out for wine and cake (the play is oddly insistent that there is cake, although this drama is too intellectually serious to put said cake on stage.) What, basically, are your odds of wanting to fuck him after you talk about it? Is the dating pool really that limited? "But we're old," the man--in his sixties?--says; clearly this the chief implausibility. 

This was in all seriousness about as boring an evening as I have spent in a theatre. In an interview, the playwright-dramaturg-whatever claims a universal relevance to this piece, mentioning even its relevance to the Syrians--a people who have suffered enough. I fled before the Q&A. Australians on bus home about a million times more engaging--one of them had just bought a kayak.