Hopes were high for Contains Violence, David Rosenberg’s site-specific show at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. But they plummeted after a wave of negative reviews (including this page’s) pointed out that, for all the thrilling technology (you watch the piece on the theatre’s roof terrace through binoculars and listen to it through specially adapted headphones), it featured a fist-bitingly boring narrative. So critics have a right to feel a tad redundant when a show so resoundingly trashed has been extended, presumably due to popular demand. As Charlie Spencer (who was recently announced as the British Press Awards’ critic of the year) once said, he would rather his readers paid money to watch a good show that he said was bad, than wasted money on a bad show he said was good. So, no doubt, would David Rosenberg.
