Mime legend looks back in torpor

Claire Heggen may be the co-founder of an influential physical theatre company, and a respected veteran of French mime, but you'd never know it from this solo show. Le Chemin Se Fait En Marchant (Life is What You Make It) is a retrospective of the past 30 years, with film fragments of her experimental work as well as flesh-andblood re-enactments of it.

It's billed as a portrait of her "life and experiences as a performer", only instead of being thrilled by her artistic joyriding, you soon have the dread sense of watching a middle-aged woman rolling around in wafty purple flares, a sparkly puce top, and a green sock pulled over her head like a woolly hat.

Heggen's supporters say she's a fearless, mercurial performer, unafraid to self-immolate one minute, and then preen like a showgirl the next. This is true, as are her abilities as a physical actor.

Heggen can switch from beauty to ugliness, and youth to age, while her smallest gesture conveys an intense resonance, such as when she waves her arms like wings, only instead of an individual bird, Heggen is all humanity in flight. Her clown/tramp is also good, as is her ability to skip around with a giant piece of tissue paper and make you see swaddling, veils, and shrouds.

But then comes the reminiscence of her childhood ballet classes (cloying), her silly walks (cringe-worthy), and the jaw-droppingly bad film of five dancers crawling crab-like over desert sand dunes, for what purpose I know not. There are also naff props and sentimental confetti-throwing.

Small and hardy, Heggen is in robust fettle and granite will crumble before her commitment. She just needs to find a better way to display her back catalogue. And she needs to tone down her artist-on-the-cross act. Creative suffering needn't be this ostentatious.

Until tomorrow (0870 3800 400).