Contains Violence

Published Thursday 3 April 2008 at 11:55 by Heather Neill

It is certainly an unusual experience, sitting on the Lyric’s roof terrace, muffled against the early spring cold, one’s head pinched by industrial-sized earphones and with binoculars at the ready.

A drama unfolds in the offices opposite. The offices are real; the murderous events therein, theatre.

David Rosenberg, a founder member of the Shunt collective, has devised this site-specific show to explore (according to the programme) the “unique possibilities of theatre as a live event”. He also strives “to place the audience at the centre of the theatrical experience”.

In the first he succeeds; theatregoers removed from their accustomed environment are prepared for new perspectives. But the audience is alienated, not simply by watching a story - involving love, angst, a psychopathic stalker-cum-killer, a skimpy marketing brief and death by office equipment - at such a distance, but because each individual is cut off in a private technological space. Denied the shared experience of true theatre, no one cracks a smile at moderately funny lines and there is scant involvement in the passions beyond the double glazing.

The cast performs spiritedly and the soundscape is a minor phenomenon, but this adds up to no more than a bold experiment in which the story is less important than the means of its telling.