Neither electric nor terrific

The Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award aims to promote 'bold, innovative and challenging' work. This year's winner, Boileroom, has put on an experimental show investigating the change brought about by the advent of electricity. Performers dance with vacuum cleaners and wrestle with lamps, while a speaker tries to imagine what the landscape was like before electricity pylons.

At the heart of the show is a fable about an opera singer inviting a mysterious doctor into her home. Among other things, the guest surgically removes the diva's voice. This ambiguous fairy tale is told in rather soupy tones by an offstage narrator: the onstage performers remain largely wordless.

There are moments of impressive stage invention that evoke the transformative wonders of electricity; for instance, the visually intriguing tableau in which two characters 'speak' to one another by inserting the ends of an electronic panel into their mouths and we see live text running between them.

There's wit, too, when a woman manically orders as many electrical appliances as she can think of. But the more pleasingly surreal elements never gel into a whole. The story of the doctor and the diva remains frustratingly underdeveloped, and the pseudo-poetry of the spoken narrative proves a weak linguistic counterpart to the show's visual highlights.

The Terrific Electric
Barbican: The Pit
Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS