Edinburgh 2002

Fringe

Professor Wren's Goldfish
The Smirnoff Underbelly

James Panton

This two-man show claims to begin at the point when 'the philosophy of subjectivity gets personal'.

You might guess that this is one for (and about) philosophy post-grads with a continental bent: two players find themselves on a stage strewn with books and begin to invent the story of the philosopher, his lover and a post-grad student who gets in between.

The players, producer, writer and director, who compose the Captive Audience company, all hail from the award-winning Workshop Theatre in Leeds. Their stated mandate is to make provocative theatre that isn't afraid of big ideas. Playing around with reality, they consciously try to confuse the boundaries between reality and theatre, and toy with a number of questions of personal identity and subjectivity - a banana and a knife are also cunningly worked into the plot which is is apprently being written by the two characters as they go along.

Although there's little that could be said against the performances and the direction, the writing is ultimately a bit unsatisfying. It's sometimes funny in an intellectually masturbatory kind of way - much in the way the whole philosophy of post-subjectivity is - full of in-jokes and self-reflexive dialectical type stuff. If you like that kind of stuff, or if it's raining outside, it's worth going for a wry wanky smile. But this isn't a piece of theatre that will stay with you for very long.

Until 18 August: 14.00 (45mins)