Conceived and created by Anonymous Society, also known as Andrew Wale and Perrin Manzer Allen, Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others uses the music of The Smiths (Morrissey and Marr) to present an original piece of music theatre.

Anonymous Society are the company who achieved critical acclaim in 1999 with their own take on the works of the singer-songwriter Jacques Brel. Now, using 20 songs that were originally performed by The Smiths, they present a show which features six performers and a live string quartet.

What this means, in simple terms, is that the performers sing their way through the songs and use dance, physical theatre and projections to impress new meanings on the songs. It's a bit like watching an opera, a musical or a dance performance all rolled up into one.

Now then, I have a high threshold for avant garde conceits. I read experimental underground poetry of my own volition and I listen to Brian Eno's music, you know, the ambient stuff. Hell, I'll even watch Peter Greenaway films for fun - his early ones at that! But Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others is possibly the most pretentious thing that I've seen for years.

It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that every second of its skimpy 90 minutes was torture and no exaggeration at all to say that I would have left the theatre had there not been a big guy sitting at the end of my row whom I couldn't face disturbing.

So what's the problem? The incomprehensibility of the action? Its annoying obliqueness? Characters you don't understand and couldn't care less about? The way that some of the most beautiful British pop songs of the past 20 years are completely massacred by a bunch of lily-livered luvvies? Yes, all this and more.

Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others features songs that soothed you through adolescence and renders them meaningless with a hateful and overblown production, like the worst excesses of pomp rock (cue strobes and - I'm not making this up - a half-naked man in a bunny costume), crossed with crude attempts to mimic the work of Pina Bausch.

It's saying something when you look back and consider the highlights of a show to be the bits with the circus skills, tap dancing and sign language. I mean really, what were they thinking?

Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others is visually impressive and "theatrical" as hell, but it's unbearably superficial. The songs they feature were the soundtrack to so many lives and they don't deserve to be treated like this.

By the end of the show I felt angry that this pointless piece of theatre had eaten up valuable minutes of my life. I was angrier still that the show had also de-queered the songs. The Smiths and repressed homosexuality go together like pigs in a blanket - yet you'd never have guessed it by watching this.

Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others will most likely appeal to people who don't know the songs, or Smiths fan completists. The rest of you, save your money and go and buy Hatful of Hollow instead.

Some Girls Are Bigger than Other, with songs by Morrissey and Marr; conceived by Andrew Wale and Perrin Manzer Allen, Aka Anonymous Society
Lyric Theatre
King Street
Hammersmith
London, W6
08700 500 511

5-23 July 2005

Get Mark Simpson's remarkable biography, Saint Morrissey online and save some money to put towards the CD Hatful of Hollow.