Bright sparks in the darkness

Going Dark at the Old Vic occasionally lights up like a shooting star.
Fiona Mountford12 March 2012

Few, if any, companies can beat Sound and Fury when it comes to immersive theatre.

Using an enhanced 3-D soundscape and often plunging both performers and audience into thrilling and destabilising total darkness, they take us straight to the sensory heart of a story, as they did so magnificently at this venue with the submarine-set Kursk. Going Dark, though not without its fine moments, unfortunately blazes a lesser trail.

It's certainly atmospheric, with bursts of that trademark darkness and sound bouncing all around in Mark Espiner and Dan Jones's production, but Hattie Naylor's script is frustratingly thin. Solo performer John Mackay plays Max, single father of six-year-old Leo and an astronomer working at a planetarium, who learns that he is going blind. Lengthy, sub-Brian Coxstyle lectures on the solar system, represented digitally on the ceiling, intersperse scenes of domestic reckoning.

Max's precious but increasingly fragile home life is so much more interesting than his repetitive work that we wish he'd stop wittering on about the planets. Of course the point is that everything, on both micro and macro levels, is about making sense of our place in the universe, but it's only when Max, given a wonderfully humane rendering by Mackay, talks chokingly about remembering his son's face that the piece sparkles like a shooting star.

* At the Young Vic until March 24, 020 7922 2922

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