The Argus: Brighton Festival 2012

It started so well. Ushered into the dank, vaulted interior of the Old Municipal Market, we gathered around intriguing Heath Robinson-esque automata.

In dark nooks, the back end of a car revolved to reveal two socked feet sticking from the boot and a machine catapulted onions down a chute into a chopping device, bringing tears to the eyes.

But such imaginative endeavour seemed to have been exhausted by the time it came to the performance.

Belgian theatre group Berlin (keep up, it gets more baffling) are described as “portraying reality like a painter”. If only. They portrayed reality exactly like reality – frequently less interesting than the telly and played out agonisingly slowly.

Through a cryptic opening sequence, it was just about possible to make out that two people had done something bad; the tone then switched dramatically to a blow-by-blow reanactment of a murder trial at a farmhouse that straddled the border of France and Belgium.

Film montage was used to do nothing more than what people standing on stage could have done; actors were employed to convey exactly what a film could have conveyed. It was hard not to question why one was watching this in a dripping and bitterly cold building and not on the TV which at least benefits from an off button.

With the audience positioned on a steep rake, all to be seen at eye level were the surtitles, translated so badly as to be farcical (unless Belgians really do say things like “you carry your a*** behind you”).

Peering down at the stage didn’t yield many rewards either – just two people sitting at opposite ends of a very long table and, on the screens, the cinematic spectacle of a group of lawyers staring at the people on the stage. Now and again there were bursts of ominous music to remind us this was meant to be exciting.

As a demonstration of ways to test an audience’s patience and abuse the term “multimedia” this excelled, but as a piece of theatre it failed painfully and repeatedly.