Bepo & Co

Lurching from one human tragedy to another, Bepo the clown is out of luck. Tonight, Bepo and his decreasingly merry band of clowns survive the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, the Great Depression, the banana massacres in Latin America and the burning oil fields of Kuwait. But with each horror, despair gets the better of the gang. Indeed, there are hints of Zinnie Harris's The Wheel in its pan-historical approach to the horrors of war. In some respects, this is a quasi-contemporary reimagining of Voltaire's Candide: only for this troubled troupe, there is no Dr Pangloss to keep the spirits up.

Whilst it's an engaging idea and is fairly poignant in places, Bepo & Co is quite a messy production. Messy in terms of the stage direction, with the actors regularly bumping into each other in a barely controlled choatic dance. Messy in terms of the rather over-wrought dialogue. And also messy in terms of its central conceit. If Bepo & Co is concerned with the impact of war and terror on art and artists, it would perhaps do well to examine it with the context of the mass slaughter of civilians. Naturally, the injustice of actors having to hold off on their rampage of hedonism, dancing and shagging loses some of its urgency in the face of much wider evil.

Nevertheless, it is a justifiably forlorn lament for the all the terrible things human beings do to each other and, for all its faults, it manages to do so in such a way that doesn't feel horrifically trite – which is something of an achievement in itself.