Lullaby

Lullaby dances its way through a hospital waiting room turned uncanny fever dream. Patients of different ages, genders and types move through a world suspended between illness and health, coming and going, being seen and unseen. They spring and bounce in their own rhythms, while the healthcare workers move in synchronised, slippery formations, more like sea creatures than people.

The contrast is sharp. Patients act in the same way but not at the same time, each in their own world and yet altogether. The dancers transform between patients, doctors and nurses, so that people themselves become part of the hospital machinery. Risa Maki is particularly agile in these shifts, moving through several characters with a multitudinous quality; Lewis James Baker has one of the few spoken parts, as both lecturer and paramedic, returning in different guises. Liudmila Loglisci gets one of the strangest transformations as an animatronic nurse, while the rest of the cast belong to the sickly, glitchy simulation the production has created.

The production and its technology work in tandem. The sound design flicks from an eerie Für Elise turned into waiting-room music to an unrelenting soundscape of lumpy, grungy noise. Projections, silhouetting and a live camera are used with similar confidence, most disturbingly when the camera gives us the point of view of a healthcare worker sexually assaulting a patient while the action is played out beside its own projection. A hospital mattress becomes a tender ballet of PVC between two dancers, oddly beautiful against the surrounding unease. At its best, the technology feels like an X-ray into the patient and doctor psyche.

Lullaby really does search every corner of the hospital for another image, and another possible interpretation. Its energy is exhilarating, for a while. By the end, it feels as though we have spent an entire night, or perhaps multiple lifetimes in A&E, watching every possible action and interaction pass before us. Perhaps that's the point? But Lullaby's abundance starts to loosen the piece's grip. Healthcare workers are alien creatures in one moment and troubled humans in the next; technology is presented as both threatening and stupid. A few scenes push so far into absurdity or sexuality that they feel as though they belong to another argument. The production can be difficult to keep control of.

That is where the politics become less certain. Lullaby, technically apt, creates a vivid world of anxiety, dehumanisation and institutional power, and its movement can make those things physically legible. But it is less clear what it finally wants to say about healthcare itself. A hospital does contain every walk of life; the production sometimes seems to want to do the same.

Lullaby by Jasmin Vardimon Company.