David Leddy's Untitled Love Story

For a show that oh so earnestly wants the audience to feel something, anything, David Leddy's Untitled Love Story is criminally distant and ice cold.

Set amidst the echoing canals of Venice, four different lives in four different decades overlap. The characters tell their stories of loss, pain, loneliness and longing. Despite never meeting, their stories interweave in a similar fashion to David Mitchell's Russian Doll style narrative in Cloud Atlas.

Leddy's writing sparkles like the early morning sun on the lagoon, and the staging makes effective, if fussy, use of a giant red cloth. But the production becomes decidedly soggy when it gets to its central trick and tries to lift the bonnet of the artistic process.

On four occasions the audience is asked to meditate in the darkness, to think of a time "when you missed somebody so much it physically hurt" or "when you had bodily fluids glistening on your skin". Each character then shares when the same thing happened to them.

It foregrounds the inner workings of how we consume art and it's an interesting, ambitious, idea – but it backfires. By telling the audience what they should be feeling, Leddy is indulging in an emotional control-freakery that leaves the characters moping around the Campos of Venice disengaged and aloof.

The final image is unwittingly poignant: a small gondola standing in the immensity of the stage. Like the play, it is a work of art dwarfed and lost amidst the ambitious platform it has built for itself.