Lyn Gardner 

A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians

Lyn Gardner finds it hard to focus, as two Polish chancers on a bender find their identities slipping away
  
  

Andrew Tiernan and Andrea Riseborough in A Couple Of Poor Polish-Speaking Romanians
Make-believe... Andrew Tiernan and Andrea Riseborough in A Couple Of Poor Polish-Speaking Romanians. Photograph: Tristram Kenton Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Out on the road you can be whoever you want to be, but in cutting loose you can lose yourself, too. High on drugs, two young Poles, Dzina and Parcha, set off on a road trip, holding up a passing motorist and pretending to be a couple of poor, Polish-speaking Romanians with blackened teeth.

But as the high turns to a low and the night unravels, so does their own sense of identity. The fiction they have created gradually becomes a reality. Penniless and far from Warsaw, this existential Bonnie and Clyde may seem threatening, but they are as lost as Hansel and Gretel. They become what they pretended to be, outcasts treated with suspicion who must use their wits to survive and deal with a growing sense of hopelessness.

Dorota Maslowska has been lauded in her native Poland, but something appears to have been lost in translation because this road movie for the stage often loses its way.

Perhaps for Polish audiences Dzina and Parcha's escapade has a greater significance, but this self-conscious piece lacks bite and humour and does nothing to make its protagonists at all engaging. In the end, I did not care a jot that the pair are consumed by their own tale.

· Until March 29. Box office: 0870 429 6883.

 

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