Lyn Gardner
Saturday October 9, 2004
The Guardian

Weirdly compelling and yet sometimes rather irritatingly opaque, Ignacio Apolo's two-hander hails from two distant lands: Argentina and adolescence. Leto and Fish, students at a boys-only school, are hardly friends but are drawn together by their shared outsider status in the class, a probing of each other's weaknesses, and sublimated desire. They hang around together in a boarded-off area of the school where they discover that they can spy on one of the young women teacher's when she uses the toilet. Soon hot-headed adolescent fantasies are bubbling and boiling.

Apolo's play captures all the blankness and cross-wiring of adolescence. Played with gawky, clumsy conviction by Alex Waldmann and Kevin Trainor, Leto and Fish construct their own goldfish bowl which has them blinking out helplessly on the world through the bulletproof glass of teenage fantasy. They are unreachable, locked into a prison of their own construction. Unable to escape each other, they play out their own power games in a fish-eat-fish bubble of unreality.

Seen at a preview performance, Paul Higgins's production, with its eerie score by Neil McArthur, sets exactly the right tone of a strange, dreamy dislocation from the real world that is necessary to make you accept some of the awkwardness of the plotting. Even so, the mixture of the ordinary and the surreal doesn't quite spark and combust as perhaps it should. The play is an exotic orchid, but it needs a few bog-standard carnations thrown in.

If it had been translated into an English vernacular and transposed to this country, I suspect it might work rather better than it does here, where it remains as stubbornly remote as the boys themselves. This is an intriguing theatrical game, not a real gut-wrenching experience.

· Until October 23. Box office: 020 7978 7040.

E-mail: Iapolo@argentores.org.ar                                                                                              This place was given by ARGENTORES