I Am The Wind ***

This is a marvellous production, but oh, how the play itself disappoints.

A collaborative effort between the most widely performed Norwegian playwright after Ibsen, an English translator and cast, and celebrated French director Patrice Chereau (Intimacy, La Reine Margot) and his team, even at 70 minutes long, this watery Waiting For Godot with its repetitive dialogue really dragged.

Written by Jon Fosse (who can also, apparently, lay claim to being the most widely performed living European dramatist) and translated by Simon Stephens (does the fault lie with him?), this ocean-bound musing on depression and suicidal thought starts strikingly on a bleak sandy shore, with little more than a hint of the sea.The One (the characters have no names, no background) soaked and naked to the waist, is caught up in the arms of The Other, and cradled, pieta-like, for several, extraordinary, silent minutes.

Then, in flashback, we see the two young men embark on what is presumably a symbolic as well as an actual voyage further and further out to sea, away from the safety of dry land and sheltered cove, until The One finally plunges.

The staging is hypnotic. The auditorium floods with water as their raft-like boat rises from the sea, a tilting island of temporary, precarious safety on life’s journey. And the acting is no less impressive, with Jack Laskey (his hair wild as Heathcliff, his eyes just as troubled) trying to understand the disaffected apathy of Tom Brooke’s The One.

But the sheer banality of much of the script irritates, and ultimately, once the water has retreated and this gloomy and unenlightening two-hander has come full circle, it’s Richard Peduzzi’s kinetic set which remains in the memory.

Young Vic, The Cut, SE1 8LZ Tube: Southwark/ Waterloo (0207 922 2922) youngvic.org Until May 21 (£10.00 - £27.50)