It’s an old cliché that there is nothing more boring than listening to someone talking about their dreams. Exsomnia proves that watching an hour of someone else’s nightmares is even less interesting.Exsomnia is billed as horror, and it does try to scare the audience with unsettling imagery, morphsuits and omnipresent sound effects, but these attempts ring hollow and at times become merely bizarre, or even unintentionally amusing. Several scenes are clearly intended to not be horror at all (a conversation between three squeaky-voiced clouds being a particular standout), which would be a welcome change from the rest of the production that could even have strengthened the horror segments by contrast - if they were interesting rather than simply ridiculous.It is difficult to truly empathise with the nameless dreamer and no context is given for this nightmare – not for one moment do we see the waking world. In more capable hands this lack of knowledge could feed into the sense of unease and fear, but instead the audience have no reason to care, and the lack of a coherent narrative – though admittedly dreamlike – turns Exsomnia into a progression of loosely connected scenes. Still, the play does have some consistency in its narrative, creating its own recurrent symbology; a lost shoe, a cup of tea, a snowglobe, a sinister bottle of pills... Some facts can be discerned; the dreamer seems to wrestle with the loss of their mother, which is one of the driving forces of the nightmare.The actors slip into and out of roles, sometimes without regard to gender, with characters denoted only by costumes. This is acknowledged, once, but adds nothing. Delivery was an issue, with the majority of the performers mumbling their way through lines, though this could be attributed to opening night anxiety.The show is full of impressive visuals and at times is very well-lit indeed, but for each perfectly crafted tableau there are others which fall utterly flat. There are continual sound effects, but as these are mostly distortion, shrieking alarms, ominous thuds, retching and tinnitus they quickly become infuriating. The only reason they were audible over the gnashing of my teeth was their sheer volume – those with sensitive ears are strongly recommended to avoid this show, and any shows in neighbouring studios have my sympathies. It is to be hoped this, too, will be fixed in future performances.Exsomnia ends with a warning not to repeat the dreams witnessed, but I consider it my duty as a review to ignore this and issue a warning of my own; ultimately all Exsomnia has to say is that dreams can be strange, a fact anyone who has ever been to sleep already knows full well.
