Horizontal Collaboration

It's difficult to overstate the accolades and acclaim meted out to David Leddy. And why not? His insatiable urge towards inventiveness of form in theatre is undeniable – and no less evident in Horizontal Collaboration which sees four new actors delivering the script completely blind every night. But this high regard seems not to infect the (at least) three audience members who snooze through most of tonight's performance. This is certainly ambitious, but it's also pretty turgid.

The play's premise requires the actors to play four lawyers – stand-ins for the regulars at a UN war crimes tribunal. They read through previously unseen interview transcripts regarding alleged crimes committed by Judith K, the wife of an African warlord. The issues are certainly meaty, and all too real: the crimes take place in a region where 48 women are raped every hour, where dynasties keep power through murder, and where the West is implicated via its purchase of minerals we know are stained by exploitation. And there's certainly a nugget of genius in the dramatisation of this: as the actors read details of horrific crimes, they should react organically to the amoral no-man's land which confronts them. Their humanity scratches at the surface of their professionalism.

Except that doesn't really happen tonight – only one actor really engages with the text beyond simply struggling through the words. Worse still, the conceit frames the whole performance, and not just the supposely "unseen" bits of it. Who reads hesitantly from a script when introducing themselves? And why would four lawyers all drink water or change screens on their laptops simultaneously? Rather than focusing on their reactions to the transcripts, the effect is of a robotic, monotone ritual. If the point is to emphasise the faceless bureaucracy of the UN's legal black hole, then this this is a rather dull exercise in hopelessness.