Some experimental theatre is bizarre and challenging and investigates propositions of human behaviour on a test subject audience. Some experimental theatre is shocking, touching and terrifying.  Some of it flies, and some of it fails.

Directed by Nisha Madhan and designed by Stephen Bain, Lies finds four performers – Ash Jones, Julia Croft, Lara Fishcel-Chisholm and Josh Rutter – exploring the possibilities of lying through a loose series of theatre games and semi structured improv. 

The beginning is messy.  We drift from pre-show into show with little distinction, glow-sticks are waved, hooters blown and masked folk sit amongst the audience. This messy, confused aesthetic carries through the rest of the piece.  Sometimes it is used well, exploiting the audience’s undivided attention in one spot to create something surprising in another spot.  At other times it is simply exhausting. 

There is no narrative, but rather a series of scenes. A woman recounts an anecdote while a cat holds her hand in its mouth, chewing down on the flesh when he senses she is not being strictly accurate. A director tries to get a sincere performance out of an actor through a series of brisk commands. A parade of be-masked and bewigged figures creep about behaving oddly.

These tangentially connected games and episodes bleed from one into the other, staged all around the audience (seated in the Understudy bar space, sectioned off with bright red curtains) in explorations of performativity, truth and deception. Audience reactions are mixed.  Some laugh loudly, while others appear to be asleep. 

The performers are brave, and occasionally charming, but they laugh at themselves too much; a little of this could have been appealing, but an excess feels self-indulgent.  There are some strong visual moments (a glow stick-faced person is particularly memorable), and the music and soundtrack are interesting, sometime supporting the scene, sometimes fighting it.

There is a section in the centre that is engaging, where the games are working, and where I feel that the exploration is interesting, and the covenant between performers and audience, as undefined as it is, is working. But that feeling unfortunately dissipates as the show continues, and games are repeated too many times (a section in which performers read a list of lies outstays its welcome particularly). 

By the halfway mark things designed to be confronting have become boring. The ending keeps extending and a ‘funeral for the show’ in which we are asked to share our thoughts peters out as audience members slink towards the exit [at a quarter past midnight].  If this had finished twenty minutes earlier I would have enjoyed it twenty times more.

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