Exposed[author-post-rating] (2/5 stars)

That we are, as human beings, susceptible to certain impulses is a truth universally acknowledged – the desire to make a noise in a quiet place, perhaps, or tell someone a secret. In Exposed, this young company of Northampton University graduates are concerned with taking a further look at the momentary desires that drive us to good or to ill.

They do this largely through a combination of physical theatre, projection and monologue, and you certainly can’t accuse this young company of a lack of energy. Unfortunately, they fail to back up all the running and jumping with any kind of emotional through-line or coherent plot. All this means that, by the end, you can’t quite shake the feeling you’ve just spent 50 minutes watching an aerobics class.

The brief monologues range in subject matter, though every character is plagued by an urge they want to ignore and overcome. Most are quite dramatic in scope, looking at the destructive impulse in more depth than the strange or funny; this seems ill-considered, as they often struggle for credibility. For instance, the woman with the recurrent urge to hit people with her car is tortured by her inexplicable urges, but why doesn’t she consider just getting the bus? Neither the characters nor their problems feel quite fully-formed, here.

Some of the ideas are OK on their own, with a few nice moments involving the clever use of projections, as the cast screen videos onto each other’s white shirts and parts of the set. There’s also bits and pieces of audience interaction, which are inevitably variable in success, including an impromptu auction and a scene in which they give the audience two minutes to do “whatever they want” to the performers. Unfortunately, these scenes place too much pressure on the audience themselves to drive things forward, without having done enough to create an environment that makes people lose their inhibitions.

Ultimately, what nice ideas there are feel disconnected from each other, as if Impulse Collective has simply thrown everything at the wall to see what sticks. The result is a piece of physical theatre that, in spite of its likeable performers, ends up feeling like style without substance and stylised movement for the sake of movement, without a point.

Exposed can be seen at C Aquila every day until 26 August. For more information and tickets, visit the Edinburgh Fringe website.