YOU will not witness a more visually sensational theatre company than Leeds multi-media experimentalists Imitating The Dog, but that is only half the story.

The story is where writers and directors have often fallen down in the past, and for a company on alien terms with narrative clarity, it is a bravura step to construct a play with not one but five overlapping stories involving the same three couples.

More accurately, it is five different versions of a story with the same starting point of a British Intelligence Officer, Harry (Adam Nash) meeting a Russian, Lev (Matt Prendergast), in the dying embers of the Second World War in Berlin.

What ensues is also five different versions of history, the show taking events immediately either side of midnight on May 8 1945 – Stunde Null, the German words for the zero hour of the title – and then setting the stories within a range of possible outcomes of the war. In one, for example, the Germans had won.

What’s more, these alternative histories/stories are being observed not only by the audience but also by a Chinese film director (Song Chang) and two cameramen (WeiDa Chen, Jinyu Zhou). The film director will regularly call “Cut” to halt one version of the multi-lingual story, stopping the actors in their tracks, to start and re-start another version and then another.

This is edited live – lips on the big screen were out of synch with the sound on press night – as Nash, Prendergast, Anna Wilson-Hall, Morven Macbeth, Nicholas Cass-Beggs and Laura Atherton dance to the director’s tune, albeit with the same words and subtitles on screen at each show.

The combination of a full-stage screen and its cut-out sections, through which you see the live action being filmed against Simon Wainwright’s recorded film stock of Berlin and building interiors, provides constantly changing, memorable images but while the script is intriguing it is baffling too. The two Leeds Rhinos fans in the next two seats grew weary of the repetition and began chuntering (never mind that Rugby League has a repetitive six tackle-format!).

The science of film criss-crosses with the art of theatre, and although it is a fascinating, often sensual sight, cinema rather over-powers theatre, not for the first time in a multi-media show.

A better script might have redressed the balance, one with more humorous moments to go with one Chinese cameraman having to leave to deal with a family teething problem and another when the German Gunter mocked the Russian Lev for being ruder than him.

Re-writing history will need another re-write by Quick and Brooks for this pulsating yet puzzling show to be wholly satisfying.

 

The Zero Hour, Imitating The Dog, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, tonight, and tomorrow 7.45pm, then on tour. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk