Growing old without grace

The transcendent and the tedious are often a hair's breadth apart in the theatre. David Glass's curious new show is a mixture of both. It can make you want to watch forever, then want to leave, in the space of a minute.

Glass hobbles onstage, bent double with age and wearing a pair of pyjamas and the whey-coloured make-up of a clown. In an elaborate manoeuvre, he contorts himself into a plush velvet theatre seat, falls asleep and slithers through the cracks in the auditorium floor on to a pile of old rubbish and programme notes.

This is the setting for an exploration of ageing and the decay of mind and body. Glass's limbs, once his instruments, no longer do what he wants them to. His body takes on a life of its own: it keeps misbehaving. In one mimed sequence he wrestles with his tongue, in another he expels his brain through his nostrils.

Glass is a magnetic physical performer of immense, goofy charm. But the production, billed as 'surreal vaudeville', feels like a series of intriguing noodlings rather than a fully-realised experience. Glass floats off into his own world, forgetting to take the audience with him, then suddenly hooks and draws us along again. Disembodied creates an atmosphere of haunted nostalgia and at his best, Glass transforms pain into comedy.

Until Mar 13, BAC, 176 Lavender Hill SW11, Tue to Sat 8pm, Sun 6pm, Mar 10 mat 1.30pm, £14.75, £6.50 concs. Tel: 020 7223 2223. www.bac.org.uk Rail: Clapham Junction

Disembodied