Cart Macabre, a fascinating and frustrating cross between a ghost train ride and an art installation from performance collective Living Structures, is a triumph of form over content. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it at least means the piece makes effective use of its setting, the dankly atmospheric Old Vic Tunnels.
Nothing can trump the superlative opening, when 32 plucky participants/spectators are wheeled off individually on morgue-style trolleys, to be deposited in ramshackle little eight-person wooden carts. Here we are confronted with a darkness so intense it’s both nauseating and destabilising.
The rest, a Health and Safety nightmare if ever I saw one, plays to vastly diminishing returns, as we’re trundled round a series of nondescript tableaux, most of them vivants. Vague themes of isolation and disorientation need to be much more tightly focused and some handrails in the carts would be a welcome addition.
Cart Macabre until December 22. Information: 0844 871 7628. oldvictheatre.com
Cart Macabre
The Old Vic Tunnels
Station Approach Road, SE1 7XB
