Lights Over Tesco Car Park by Poltergeist Theatre – Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh

The four young performers behind this show are enthusiastic, but their attempts to inject energy cannot disguise the fact that their material is extremely weak. Based on emails and then meetings with a man claiming to have seen strange lights over the Tesco car park in Magdalen Street, Oxford, the central narrative leads nowhere. The space is filled with self-consciously wacky costumes, anything and everything ‘space’ related, and the relation of randomly selected historical accounts of UFO encounters. Relentless audience participation seems to have no purpose except to fill out scenes. The show lacks purpose, direction and self-awareness, and the result is a production that is studenty for the wrong reasons.