Cut (Vaults Theatre, 5 July)

I'm getting tired

of plays

Where the dialogue is 

Clearly

Written in little "dramatic"

Bursts 

to

signify

The anomie of modern life or whatever but in practice just sort of 

make the actor

talk spastically

for seventy minutes.

Is there anything in culture less interesting than the idea of the serial killer?

This was a lot of foofaw for the payout that--surprise--someone is, yeah, a serial killer. The foofaw included immersions in total darkness--indeed part of the foofaw was even finding this theater, located (as the name suggests) in a vault under Waterloo Station. There were also points where the lone actor sort of scooooched rolls of cling film back and forth across the performance space, for what felt like quite a while. (You'd be surprised how quickly the sound of cling film becomes monotonous.) This, along with the enclosed space and the darkness, might well have lead to some intense performance effects. But, again, in the end, we're left the problem of this all becoming about a serial killer--like unwrapping a present to find a pair of socks, or just more wrapping paper. What was required to engineer this performance--the actor receiving directions in the dark via earpiece, the work required in setting all of this up in a weird location--was more interesting than most of which happened in the show.