The actor Mat Fraser's next project is Thalidomide - the Musical, but a rather less irreverent approach to disability is on display here. The vibrant Fraser represents the disabled theatre group, Graeae, one of three innovative companies that have collaborated on a playful drama about emotional and physical blindness.
The erotic and the neurotic combine here in two teasingly entwined stories. Edward writes audio-subtitles for raunchy films, yet his affections for Maria, a beautiful blind girl, are severely constipated; Shona has no problems expressing what she wants, but is unsure whether she wants Gaetano, the artist who paints her nude, or Dan, the boyfriend who is described untantalisingly in the script as looking "like a catalogue model, only shorter".
The four hot-shot directors who have collaborated on the piece all have a pedigree for playing daringly with the visual language of the stage - whether it's Steven Hoggett and Scott Graham of Frantic Assembly, Vicky Featherstone of Paines Plough, or Jenny Sealey of Graeae. Yet, despite the production's stylistic hi-tech elegance, which frames such provocative scenes as a young boy masturbating in front of a blind woman, it feels like a skeleton of interesting ideas in need of more flesh.
Most enjoyable is the way that the actors have also addressed deafness by playing with sign language, so that, rather than banishing one signer to the edge of the stage, each actor takes it in turns to weave signing into the central action. Simple words and actions become loaded with added meaning as the audience is forced again and again to imagine what it is like to experience the world deprived of one sense.
With a better script this could be sensational. Hopefully, this won't be their last collaboration.
Until 13 March. Information: 020 7478 0100.
On Blindness
