BIG AND SMALL Barbican

Cate Blanchett is giving a virtuoso performance but, sadly, it is not in a great classic role, but in Botho Strauss’s very boring and over-long odyssey. Many audiences will find this German expressionistic and surreal drama uphill work. Blanchett plays a woman, in a dislocated society, who meets a lot of bizarre people and fails to connect with any of them. The one scene which really works is when she is pressing all the bell-pushes of an apartment block, desperately trying to trace somebody.