Surtitle fatigue

Strange business walking into the Three Sisters at the Barbican. A vast new temporary seating complex has been built over the auditorium, and as you wander along the reverberating walkways you can peer down through the gaps and make out the familiar opulent cushions of the stalls below you, all shadowy and deserted. It’s like glimpsing the Titanic from a bathoscope. The new seating is supposed to make the Barbican’s overlarge space feel more like a theatre and less like the Nuremberg stadium. But even with fewer seats, the stage is still as large as an aircraft hangar. This gives it a mood of rangy airlessness which is intensified by Nick Ormerod’s slick and perfunctory design based on chairs and bric-a-brac variously disposed and a couple of flats carrying suggestive photographs. I had a horrible feeling that Ormerod’s aim was to create a set that would be easy to build, dismantle and transport.