Crossed Wire, at the Burton Taylor Theatre

November 26th - 30th at 7.30pm

Crossed Wire is a piece of devised theatre about the meaningless infantilisation of communication that's carried out through media and political vox-pop culture. Tom Gatti, playing a generic Blairite politician, recites a speech of absurdities constructed from fragments taken from actual political orations, rearranged to form meaningless mantras like "stand up and be counted or sit down and be a paedophile." News reporters relate tales of four-year-old children leaving home in a fit of domestic angst with the same seriousness, or lack of seriousness, as reporting international war crime. And lobotomised secretaries communicate in slogans extracted from cosmetics adverts and the worst of fashion magazines. Set against all this speedy superficial tosh is a courtroom monologue of "real" human pain, a woman telling us about the violent murder of her husband. Crossed Wire ends with a total failure and rejection of communication; after 45 minutes of speaking only stuff and nonsense, the six actors find they're unable to say anything at all, and are calmed only by having buckets placed on their heads. Words, we assume, have been so depersonalised by vox-pop vacancy, that no-one can find a mode of expression that is capable of representing "real" feeling.

On a surface level, Crossed Wire works fine. The rhythms and rhymes of the politician's speeches form pleasant, energetic poetry, and, although it could be tighter, the devised movements were fun to watch. Nick Gill's music is as wonderful as always, and the actors are uniformally competent, with Kate Fowler in particular distinguishing herself with her appropriately vacant beauty. And certain concepts in the play are extremely intelligent: the moment when a Blair puppet is constructed from screwed up sheets of The Guardian, especially, is surreally hilarious.

Having said that, I found Crossed Wire's content extremely suspect and its argument logically flawed; the surface competency of the piece became only a persuasive mask over this ideological dubiousness, albeit a fun one to watch. Firstly, the relationship between "real" human feeling and media reportage is far more complex than the black-and-white dichotomy that Crossed Wire appears to set up. But moreover, all forms of media expression - radio, television, broadsheet and tabloid news - were treated as a conglomerate mass, with the same accusations levelled at all modes. Snobbish it may sound, but I'm not sure it's fair to treat Guardian reportage in the same way as trash celebrity gossip mags; yes, both rely to a certain extent on human interest stories and the emotional manipulation of their audience, but surely that extent is crucial? It was a fun 45 minutes of theatre, and it did make me laugh, but a jibe at Blairite-media culture is an easy one to make, and Crossed Wire needed to have shown more originality of material, and consistency of thought. And to have had a more viable alternative to the downfalls of vox-pop culture than simply placing a bucket over one's head.

Minnie Saunders