Combine the often gruesome authenticity of 999 calls with their life-and-death urgency and you have a potent source of drama, albeit one at a permanent panic pitch.

The baffled child whose mother is dying, the terrified husband whose wife is choking, and the luckless neighbour who finds the man next door has cut off his arm with a chainsaw — Gate co-director Carrie Cracknell has taken the transcripts from real-life emergency calls and presented them on the stage of the Notting Hill micro-theatre.

I say present, because for all its ability to unsettle the audience and reveal our longing to keep life intact, the 45-minute Breathing Irregular is more a recital than a piece of theatre. Cracknell will surely argue that she intentionally under-metamorphosed the material for the stage to keep it raw but the result often feels like a read-through.

Jane Mason’s dance sequences are more conspicuously performed yet they are collaged rather than integrated with the speech (a conflation dance-and musical-theatre achieved decades ago), plus they lack a vocabulary that illuminates the stories in movement form.

In more adept hands, the dance would resolve the stories, or tell you how they end, or reveal the lies their tellers told. Breathing Irregular has the physical appeal of dance but not the metaphysical insights choreography provides.

That’s not to discount the four committed performers, nor the rugged allure of Holly Waddington’s non-design. Her bedsit chic costumes provide much rag-taggity immediacy.
Until 27 February. Information: 020 7229 0706, www.gatetheatre.co.uk