The Library

The spirit of the soon-to-be-defunct Suspect Culture lives in this offering from Sacha Kyle, one of the two winners of this year's Arches Award for Stage Directors, in which it feels as though text, movement, sound and design have been given equal importance, with mixed results.

Alan Bissett's script takes as its starting and finishing point Kyle's concept of the human mind as a library, and in between introduces characters including a Marlon Brando fan who never became a contender for father of the year, a woman with a library fetish seeking a liaison between the shelves, and a post-graduate student drowning in a philosophy PhD.

This last character, in particular, is one that an Arches audience might be expected to recognise, and Bissett has provided her with a comically heartfelt monologue of contempt for undergraduates, but there is no light and shade in Dawn Parylo's performance. The others take a little longer to reveal themselves (in one case literally), but there's nowhere much to go from there.

The notion of the library as a place that people go to escape from themselves is both limited and limiting, and while Kyle's production certainly looks pretty, it's not clear whether she actually has anything to say.

The more elements are added to the mix – a mesmerising quintet of physical performers; a loud, frequently grating electronic soundtrack by Daniel Sarstedt; a film projected onto bookshelves – the more The Library comes off as a showcase of 'directing' that misses the mark quite fundamentally.