BWW Reviews: PROJECT COLONY, Trinity Buoy Wharf, April 4 2013

Down a narrow road to nowhere, past derelict warehouses to a forgotten dock opposite the glowering O2 just the other side of the river, one enters a world in which it's still 1952.

Gentlemen wear bow ties, ladies wear cocktail dresses and everyone is getting in the mood to the sounds of Glenn Miller's In the Mood. There's a bar, happy conversation and party games, with a band playing and some lovely close harmony singing - we could have done with a lot more of that - but there's a feeling that this lost world isn't all it seems. Its people are happy due to ignorance of what lies beyond their colony, they have no history to tell, no culture of their own. When grim-faced, white-shirted automata march in to silence the music and usher us to a dark building in which the things that go on in such dark buildings do indeed go on, we're not surprised.

Based on Kafka's short story, In The Penal Colony, Fourth Monkey's Project Colony is a devised piece of immersive theatre in which the audience both spectates and participates in a closed society's rituals, good and bad. Kafka's usual themes of arbitrary justice, the deadening, disorentating and devastating impact of bureaucracy on individuals and the imbalances of power between those who know and those who don't know, are all on show as the original story's four characters play out their destinies. It's comic - as most Kafka is - but its humour is of the darkest hue - as most of Kafka's is.

Though the spectacle is never less than compelling, Project Colony does suffer from some of the drawbacks of many devised works - there are too many speeches, insufficient character development and it's too long. But it's also ambitious and very different from most other forms of entertainment available even in London. Like Retz's The Trial (coincidentally an immersive theatre experience based on a Kafka short story) it won't be for everyone - but I'd rather be amongst the industrial architecture of Trinity Buoy Wharf with Kafka than in the temple of artifice across the river with the latest Simon Cowell money-generating machine.

Project Colony continues at Trinity Buoy Wharf until 27 April.

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