Institute

Dizzyingly tall filing cabinets and other surreally distorted pieces of office furniture set the scene for this visually awe-inspiring but otherwise opaque physical theatre production by interdisciplinary company Gecko.

Unlike previous show, Missing, which contained longer fragments of dialogue and one tangible narrative thread—a woman's fight to save her decaying soul—Institute offers multiple interpretations as to what this spectacularly muscular, multimedia experience is actually about.

Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that – this is a visceral, rather than cerebral, undertaking, and there's plenty to feel here; repressed trauma and lost love seem to haunt the dream-like piece. The institute itself – perhaps a hospital in which torturous experiments take place, or maybe just the bureaucratic home of nine-to-five tedium – breaks apart to reveal large set-pieces that conjure the lives and stories of the men who work in it.

Martin—ostensibly the name of one of these springy, acrobatic office drones—has memories of a failed relationship, which are evocatively conjured in repeated, distorted iterations of a date in a restaurant. This builds into a memorably disturbing sequence in which his limbs and head are forced in different directions by a series of long poles operated by the other performers – transformed into a human puppet.

The piece's structural laxness means that it's difficult to connect with these moments other than as a series of isolated episodes, however, and overall it could be made the more powerful for a bit of straightforward storytelling.