I am fairly sure I just funded a very expensive drama lesson for an already accomplished actor (Arthur Darvill in this performance). What I am not so sure about, is why I did it.

Maybe this makes me a philistine, but I go to the theatre to see actors deliver their trade – gripping interpretations of meaningful text that impact me both intellectually and emotionally. And when I write emotionally, I exclude from that being angered by the poor writing or acting.

Booking the tickets for this performance, I was expecting an amazing improvisation experience, visions of Robin Williams in Dead Poet Society pulling a poem out of Todd Anderson coursing through my mind. The first opening lines got me thinking I was correct – broad brush strokes setting the outline of what is about to happen – car accident, grieving parent, hypnosis – what a fertile ground for unscripted, emotional interactions. But then the truth came out – Tim Crouch announcing that every word is scripted. My heart fell.

And it kept falling through the evening as I became more and more disengaged from what was happening on stage. This was not a performance for us, the audience. This was a vanity project for Tim Crouch the practitioner – he morphed from the persona of the pathetic hypnotist to authoritative stage director to the one delivering the actor’s lines, sucking out all the air and playing puppet master to the actor.

Instead of Orff’s Carmina Burana, the theme music might as well have been Metallica’s Master of Puppets. The actor did not get to improvise – he was either given a script to read, or he was fed lines to repeat via headphones, or told out loud, what to say:  say yes – yes. When there was a slightly more complex speech or interaction, Tim would say – don’t speak just listen to what it is that you are saying – performing the lines himself. To make the entire performance even more disjointed and difficult to become immersed in, between scenes Tim also gave stage instructions out loud: stand there, use all this space you have – and so on.

I can imagine that this could have been a challenging experience for the actor, truly pushed out of his comfort zone. But I have no clue as to what about this construct was supposed to be inspiring to me, member of the audience? The actor was reading out lines he did not know from a clipboard – like a stand-in where no understudy is available – everything a bit bland, robotic, devoid of emotion. I expect the coaching and preparation to happen off , not on stage. Call this experimental theatre? Not every experiment yields worthy results – I have had significantly more fun attending my daughter’s drama class.

In addition, I found the story line very bizarre – the absurd comical elements falling completely flat. The actor is playing a grieving father – his daughter run over by Tim Crouch, who goes on to hypnotise him into believing he is naked, he has shat himself – and if that isn’t bad enough – that he was in fact the one to run down his own daughter. You don’t need a hypnotist to make parents blame themselves for anything bad that happens to their child. There is no catharsis here, its glib and pointless.

And in fact at times, it is quite offensive. There is a scene where the actor sits back-to-back with Tim Crouch, in monotone voice reading out some kind of mindfulness lesson. Tim Crouch plays his wife, and in a dreadful impression of a screechy female voice, attempts to convey the mother’s grief, all the while being spoken over by the actor. As a woman, as a mother – I found the entire scene insulting.

Maybe I should check myself, maybe I am simply not accomplished enough to appreciate the genius of this work. But I have a contra argument. To my great chagrin, standing ovations have become the done thing in London theatres this day, pretty much regardless of the quality of the performance. In this case, nobody stood up. That says a lot. From this information on the Young Vic’s website, I learnt that this play has been going since 2005. Twenty years on it is time for a rewrite.