Lyn Gardner 

London/ My Lover

ICA
  
  


Lightwork make heavy weather of this mixed-media contribution to the London international mime festival which examines the relationship of our bodies to the city and to each other. There are two stages, with screens behind them. On the left-hand side a woman is waking up; on the right a man is going to bed. The screens tell us the time (7.29am) and the London location: she is in Kentish Town, he is in Nunhead. She is an ergonomist, just off to work; he is a nurse who has finished a night shift.

By the end of the day these two strangers will have met and become lovers. But most of the action comprises blow-by-blow accounts of their days. These are acted out in the foreground by the two performers, while the screens behind show them moving across the city, their paths criss-crossing and eventually becoming one.

There is a slight sense of being a voyeur, which would be interesting if the whole thing were not so deadly dull. Robert LePage and Theatre de Complicite know all about making audiences see the extraordinary in the ordinary: they could probably make watching somebody pick their nose seem like a work of art. But here the ordinary simply comes across as banal.

This is partly because the performance fails to make a spatial or emotional connection between the live action (which often looks clumsy and false) and the screened images. And it's partly because the piece fails to convey the sense of wonder and mystery of either the city or the body. There's a lack of genuine intimacy, and silly discrepancies start to niggle. How could the woman be starting lunch with a client in central London at 14.23pm and be in the east of the city an hour later? If you wear your swimming costume to work, how do you pee all morning? Lightwork make the city seem a smaller, less interesting place.

· Ends tonight. Box office: 020-7930 3647.

 

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