From Xanadu to Camden

Site-specific work, as it's called, has been around for a few years now - taking theatre out of theatres and into unusual and interesting spaces.

But non-actor specific work is a new departure, at least to me, and San Francisco-based Antenna Theater's Chris Hardman seems to be its leading exponent.

Using MP3 technology, digital audio effects and multi-dimensional images, he creates and animates Euphor!um, an entire skewed environment which you enter once the 'opium goddess' kits you out in Walkman and 'virtual reality' goggles.

You are then plunged headlong into a brief and disorientating journey through the alternative, opium-inspired world of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his extraordinary Kubla Khan poem, 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree'.

There is no linear narrative, or live actors, on this bizarre and occasionally disturbing trip, that is indeed quite trippy.

As you enter the atmospheric Undercroft of Camden's Roundhouse, you arrive first at a bar that reminded me instantly of my favourite Amsterdam 'coffee shop', Global Chillage on Kerkstraat, with its ambient music and the smell of incense in the air.

Mark Shenton

But unlike in Amsterdam, there is nothing more stimulating on offer by way of refreshment and stimulation here than Coke (as in Cola, not the other sort) and beer.

What follows is rather more hallucinatory: one American critic has described it as "the hippest legal high on the West Coast", but Euphor!um is something else, a meeting of art installation with theatrical event that is meant to be experienced rather than merely observed.

I couldn't easily say what any of it means, but then Coleridge's poem inspires the same confusion.

Perhaps the intention is that illegal highs are required first to access those meanings, but meanwhile, simply absorb the images and linger with the experience.

Euphor!um runs til 20 October at The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road NW1 - 020 7478 0151 for details

Take a Thames Tour of Rotherhithe including the home of London's whaling and timber trades

Today's weather for London

Saturday Max 21 °C Min 16 °C

For all other forecasts, enter a town, city, country name, or a UK postcode    View National Forecast