I knew as much about this play before seeing it as I knew about Water Bears - nothing. This confusion was sustained by a psychedelic piece of drama that was consciously stylized and surreal...oh and it wasn't in a language I could understand.

Taking the hackneyed plot of a band forming and breaking up in university, it was inevitably an escapade in teenage angst, replete with themes of love and the search for identity. But, beyond the banality of the simple storyline lie deep, existentialist ideas, which confront the acquisitive nature of modernity and how today's Chinese youth perceive and are shaped by the world in different ways.

The execution of the play, however, fails to communicate such promising ideas and ultimately comes across as tacky. In imitation of foreign films, subtitles were shown on a projector as an attempt of retaining authenticity, yet a lot was lost in translation. The transcriptions were rarely in time with the action onstage and often fluctuated, making it extremely difficult for non-Chinese speakers to understand what was happening. Having to extract meanings from the written word rather than from the actor's speech, attention was diverted from the stage so that the dense dialogue was left exposed.

An injection of light-heartedness and cross-dressing provided essential comic relief and attempted to manifest serious concerns in a subtle fashion. However, I felt that the playwright was trying too hard, and sympathized with the competent Daisy Fanrong Wan (Bei) who could only do so much with the melodramatic lines she had to say. Apart from her, the only actor that held the audience's attention was the blue-haired Yuzhao Ai (Ran Chen) who showed good movement and confidence in his performance of a cool punk drummer, but was unfortunately hidden behind a drum kit for most of the play.

Although about a band, the use of music was far from sensible. The feedback and text-message bleeping off the guitar amps exasperated the audience, whilst the cheesy background music that was piped in during scenes and excessively long scene-changes could have served to cheapen the production had some interesting lighting not created a dream-like aura that complimented the tinny instrumental sounds and surreal interchanges onstage.

The pessimistic character, Bei, propounds that love is a "failed experiment" in one of her episodes of overindulgent introspection, and despite its cultural messages and its endeavour for accessibility, technical problems coupled with the murkiness of a pseudo-intellectual script mean that The Water Bears is doomed to the same evaluation. By Oisín Kearney

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