Pale imitation

11 and 12
Barbican, until 27 February

A Life In Three Acts: Bette Bourne and Mark Ravenhill
Soho, until 27 February

Peter Brook, the world’s most maddening theatre director, returns to London with an adaptation of a novel set in the French colony of Mali in west Africa. Brook is never as bad as his critics hope nor as good as his fans dream. So he always disappoints somebody. 11 and 12 tells of a schism within an oppressed Muslim sect. Some worshippers recite 11 verses of a certain prayer, others 12. The tiff intensifies and the French authorities order a crackdown. This dispute neatly encapsulates the seismic pettiness of religious controversies but the bust-up isn’t pursued very far.

Preferring discussion to spectacle, the play settles into a lugubrious strain of superficial profundity and much of the dialogue sounds like a bereavement card. (The full moon, we’re told, is the eternal symbol of truth.) The characters are both threadbare and immutable. The French are thugs in braid and epaulettes, the Africans are saintly geniuses in Old Testament hermitwear. The ‘action’ is accompanied throughout by atmospheric plinkings and plonkings, bangings and bongings, warbly dibble-dobbles and dawbly wibble-wobbles. These are provided, from the side of the stage, by a fair-trade Chinaman who sits cross-legged in aikido pyjamas scraping away at a selection of those ethnic stringed instruments which remind one rather tragically of evening classes. 

Occasionally something good surfaces. ‘What is God?’ asks an acolyte. ‘The embarrassment of the human mind,’ says his teacher. ‘Asserting his existence doesn’t help you, materially or scientifically, to prove it. Denying it seems a denial of your own existence. Yet you exist.’ Plenty of meat there but it’s a rare find in a very runny soup.