In the past Complicite have found a rich source in the work of unfamiliar European writers, most famously in Bruno Schultz's The Street of Crocodiles. But their latest work, Light, derives from a novel by Torgny Lindgren about a plague-infested 14th-century Swedish village. As always, the company's physical skill is prodigious; but in this instance I found it placed at the service of a story lacking in metaphorical resonance.
I guess the intention is to explore a society poised between order and anarchy. One day a traveller returns to the remote village of Kadis with a plague-carrying rabbit. The villagers drop like flies. The corpses mount up. Among the tiny handful of survivors, a carpenter, Konik, and his temporarily paralysed wife, Eira, struggle to live decent lives. But they are surrounded by inbreeding, bestiality, theft: even their child is stolen from them. And when a king's deputy arrives he offers less the promised clarity and light than the darkness of perverse misjudgment: it is left to the villagers to reconstruct their own community through a mixture of chance and choice.
Clearly the story is an allegorical fable in the style of William Golding: one that deals with isolated individuals in an extreme situation. But, although our own world is hardly immune to viral infection and the adaptation by Simon McBurney and Matthew Broughton establishes a firm narrative line, I found it hard to connect to the story. We are confronted by a remote peasant society that has a residual faith in divine providence and in the notion of regal justice up to the point where the king's man threatens to hang a child-eating boar: fascinating historically but of questionable modern relevance. Even the tension between law and disorder that exists in this supposedly microcosmic community seems worlds away from the kind of mobilised selfishness that threatens our own stability.
One is left admiring the skill with which the company, under McBurney's direction, reconstructs a lost world. Dick Bird's curving, wood-planked set implies a vast hidden burial ground. Scaly, scabbed puppets become corpses or children. Columns of light - created by Paul Anderson - at one point evoke a forest. And the actors show the burning commitment that derives from their being part of the creative process. Tim McMullan's Konik is a wonderful study of naive decency struggling to survive in a disintegrating world. Lilo Baur's Eira is the incarnation of maternal love. And Dermot Kerrigan switches easily from linen-suited narrator to tormented regal emissary. But, for me, this is one of those rare Complicite shows where the formidable expressive technique is put to the service of an opaque parable: one that dauntingly implies that you have to accept plagues, as well as plenty, as evidence of an ambivalent divinity.
• Until November 18. Box office: 020-7359 4404.
