Note: This review is from the 2012 Fringe

Theatre / 80 min / £30-£10 / contact venue for suitability guidelines

Showing @ Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh until Sat 1 Sep – run ended

Delivery is ultimately something that the digital age has revolutionised. Access to information, connecting with friends, exploring audio and video on demand have all been pushed straight to our fingertips. But what about online pornography? Its psychological effects are what Vanishing Point sets out to unravel in the company’s new show.

Director Matthew Lenton has paired this examination with Alice’s tumbling rabbit hole nightmare. It’s told through interweaving stories of deviancy, as in Jenny Hulse’s actress who auditions for hardcore sex games or Paul Thomas Hickey’s husband who sneaks off to indulge in live web-chat streams. Though actually a successful match, it’s somewhat predictable and clunky, generating neither a deep enough analysis of sinister desires nor a truly successful piece of visual theatre.

There are clear recollections of Vanishing Point’s previous work, including a stage which presents action right in front of us, but also scenes that are veiled behind a huge, two-pane window. The result is an impressive separation of worlds: one in which our dark, sadistic fantasies are distant and disconnected but plainly visible; and another which confronts our sexual taboos and limitations in a much more raw and uncomfortable manner.

This experimentation with form is the most rewarding feature, confirming our voyeurism yet equally trying to unhinge it. The use of camerawork and film is far from innovative multimedia theatre; instead it feels repetitive and disorganised, with clips of private chat-rooms and porn auditions cropping up again and again to make the same point about how cameras somehow falsify the experience or at the least detach us from it.

Consequentially, there is little to actually engage with. The company’s reliance on the visual trivialises any real character development or storytelling and instead produces a static theatrical experience which in no way satisfies or settles any of the issues surrounding personal boundaries that it tries to probe. What’s offered is a portal into the hellish vast of online pornography, sadly with little to actually say on the matter.

Showing as part of the Edinburgh International Festival 2012.