There can be no denying that Howard Barker is something of an acquired taste. Far better appreciated abroad than here, this playwright has, for the past 20 years, had a company, the Wrestling School, devoted to mounting his own works, which he himself has tended to direct.
It’s no wonder the Barker oeuvre can often seem in desperate need of a breath of fresh, creative air, and this hangs heavily over the latest offering.

The theme is thuddingly clear from the first line. “Do you like bad news? I do,” says the devilish Visitor (Duncan Bell) to the Barber (George Irving), while seated in the swivel chair of an old-fashioned shop.

The Visitor, almost orgasmic with rapture at his role as a harbinger of doom, reiterates insistently the not-goodness of his tidings. We might not know much, but we can conclude that it’s very bad news indeed.

When he can get a word in, the Barber rightly guesses that the impending announcement concerns the death of his son.

The piece is inspired, as only a Barker play could be, by Thucydides’s account of the destruction of the Athenian military in the disastrous Sicilian expedition of 413 BC, and thus there is ample description of rout in the armed forces.

The Barber proceeds on a rampage of destruction around his shop, but we can’t shake the enervating suspicion that the whole thing is purely an academic exercise with no drop of real, felt human emotion propelling it along. It’s the sort of drama that would struggle to stand alone without its programme notes.
Somewhere under all this lies buried a valid point about our current sensationalist news agenda, which delights in veering from disaster to disaster in a kind of tragedy porn.
Yet there’s little that Bell, Irving and director Gerrard McArthur can extract from the streams of would-be elegant lines anchored in no sort of reality. At only 70 minutes, Dying can still induce a dramatic death wish.

Until 22 November (020 7503 1646, www.arcolatheatre.com).