Castle in the air

Three young women, Piglet (Emily North), Rooster (Clare Fraenkel) and Monkey (Sara Templeman, pictured with Fraenkel), inhabit a castle with a heavily-locked door in a post-apocalyptic world. Their day-to-day routine is quirky, to say the least: They munch goldfish for supper and pass the time looking for moles in the cellar and enacting scenes from history under the watchful eyes of their guardians, Miss King and Blue.

Doubts about whether all life beyond the castle walls has been destroyed set in when a stranger called Mignon arrives. Is Blue keeping the girls safe or is she really a sinister figure who has incarcerated them because she believes 'all men are filthy-faced perverts'?

Pericles Snowdon's dystopian fairy tale is cheerfully imbecilic. The playwright has a flair for nonsense but his script succumbs to feyness. And the imaginative world he creates, with its own language and traditions, never really adds up: there's not enough internal logic for us to buy into it. On the plus side, there are some lively performances in Dominic Colenso's production. North's pea-brained Piglet, in her pink tutu, leg warmers and bobble hat, gets a lot of comic mileage out of her character's surreal innocence.

'You're completely and utterly mad,' says Mignon to Blue towards the end of the play. So is this rambling fable. But even though it's like having your head stuffed full of feathers, it occasionally tickles you.

Until Jun 9, Old Red Lion, 418 St John Street EC1, Tue to Sat 7.30pm, Sun 6pm, mat Wed May 30 1pm, £12, £10 concs. Tel: 020 7837 7816. Tube: Angel

Bluebeard
Old Red Lion
St John Street, EC1V 4NJ