Mincemeat

Trying to get comfortable on a cold stone floor and being shouted at and moved on the minute you've found a niche: this production by the ex-homeless actors of Cardboard Citizens gives its promenading audience a small taste of what it feels like to be without a fixed abode. 'Mincemeat' tells the story of an unwitting war hero - the homeless Welshman who, after taking rat poison in King's Cross in WW2, was given a posthumous military makeover and dropped off the coast of Spain carrying false papers to confuse the Nazis. Adrian Jackson and Farhana Sheikh's production ranges from modern fiction to historical faction, and from room to concrete room of the disused Cordy House. It begins with the melodrama of an anarchist kidnapping (a pig-masked gang reverse their van thrillingly in from the street) and ends in a beautifully observed and harrowing scene from a WW2 doss house. Unfortunately, there's plenty of padding and whimsy inbetween and I was left wishing for a stronger thread to lead us through the maze of invention. This strikingly acted and immersive piece is most moving when it abandons arguments or fancies for the realism of Blitz-era rubble-pickers, or east end doss house we all end up in.