Review; THE FAHRENHEIT TWINS Unity Theatre.

Byline: Marc Waddington

IF THERE'S one thing worse than having children play adults, it's having adults play children.

The Fahrenheit Twins, as brought to life by company Told By An Idiot, was a fine example of the worst kind of theatre.

Initially, the premise wasn't bad: the offspring of two intrepid explorers, the twins embark on their own journey into the frozen wastes of the North Pole in a bid to discover how to stop time following the death of their mother.

Based on a short story by Dutch-born Australian (now living in Scotland) Michael Faber, the play weighed in at 90 minutes, which, given how much time was effectively wasted on deliberate, overblown physical theatre, was about an hour too long. The dialogue between brother and sister was sparse, to say the least, and the choice of music was, well, baffling.

Now, pop quiz: can anyone suggest the connection between David Bowie's Young Americans Wings' Let Me Roll It and Lionel Ritchie's You Are My Destiny? No, Neither can I. The songs have nothing in common, and even less in the way of thematic congruity with the subject matter of the play. Sitting watching while two adults pretend to toboggan around on a huge, fluffy, white shag-pile set for three or four minutes at a time, it was as though they thought that, at the very least, the audience will come away having heard a couple of decent songs, if not having seen a half-decent play.

Practically nothing happens. Carmichael and Hunter roll around on the floor pretending to be kids and, occasionally, huskies, in a production that would struggle to bag itself a GCSE in drama.

It would be great to be able to say that the best thing about this play was the interval, but this critic can't even say that, because there wasn't one. It was 90 minutes of eye-wateringly bad theatre, and nothing else.

The problem with The Fahrenheit Twins was it just didn't seem to know what it wanted to be. Low on dialogue, but not compensated for by any particularly good physical theatre; low on humour, but not compensated for by any real drama.

It simply did not warrant being the hour-and-a-half's traffic of the Unity stage.

As a venue that showcases some of the finest theatre Liverpool has to offer, it needs to think again before it wastes its - or our - time with the likes of this again.

Abysmal 3/10