Theatre happens on London Transport every day - those small dramas that play out between passengers while everyone pretends not to listen in. So director Paul Higgins has had the nifty idea of staging a show on a bus while his Theatre 503 venue gets a makeover
Well, sort of. In fact, the bus remains pretty much stationary and Donald Marguiles's 30-minute playlet observes a handful of passengers on a New York train, so while the production draws clear parallels between post-9/11 anxieties and the London bombings, it inevitably loses some of the texture of the piece.
We hear a man squabbling loudly down the mobile about dinner with his girlfriend ("the chicken is a metaphor!"), and a married couple planning their childcare schedules with Palm Pilots and frightening, yuppie precision. Two women sit and read and a motherly conductor punches tickets. The group is confronted by an apparition: a pale, bleeding boy who could be real or ghostly (either way, the conductor offers him a lollipop).
All of this is interspersed with a deadpan voice-over of excerpts from distressing news reports - not the most subtle device, although it nails how we tune in and out of what's going on in the world, and how easy it is to ignore the warning voice in the back of our minds. And if Marguiles's play is willowy, its final line achieves a troubling beauty.
Until Dec 3, Cleopatra's Needle, Embankment WC2, Tue to Sat 8pm, free (donations to the London Bombings Relief Charitable Fund), booking essential. Tel: 020 7978 7040. Tube: Embankment.
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