http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/ar ts/2005/07/07/btsmiths07.xml&sSheet=/arts/2005/07/ 07/ixartleft.html

Manchester is the focus of two new shows - one that desecrates the memory of its finest band, another that warmly celebrates the swinging '60s, writes Charles Spencer

Just occasionally, shows prove so excruciatingly awful that you are driven close to tears of boredom and irritation. Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others is one such production.

It's grindingly pretentious, murkily obscure, punishingly dull, and it inflicts grievous damage on the superb catalogue of the Smiths, for my money the last indisputably great band in the history of British pop.

In the lyrics of Morrissey, the Smiths captured the chronic self-obsession of adolescence with a deliciously mournful wit - if Eeyore had been a pop star he would have been just like Morrissey - while Johnny Marr's superb chiming guitar and hook-laden melodies miraculously transformed clinical depression into excitement.

The whole point of Smiths songs is that they are the anthems of solipsistic teenagers too shy and too self-loathing to enjoy a life outside their foetid bedrooms. They conjure a world of loss, yearning, loneliness and resentment, where the rain constantly falls on humdrum towns that drag you down. Yet, somehow, self-mocking humour shines through the misery.

Perrin Manzer Allen and Andrew Wale, collectively known as Anonymous Society, who have "conceived and created" this show, have totally ignored all that. Instead, they have come up with a dire, dull slab of performance art that makes Strindberg seem like your favourite jolly uncle.

It's hard to tell what it's all about; indeed, I'd take a bet that Anonymous Society themselves are pretty hazy about what it all means, but relentless misery is the prevailing mood, dysfunctional families the leitmotif.

Against video projections of sad children wandering down desolate corridors and clips from porn movies, four women and two men launch themselves into horribly rearranged versions of the songs. Marr's wonderful guitar has been replaced by a string quartet called Eclipse, sawing vigorously away, and there is much sampled noise and beats.

A dirty old man keeps looking up the skirt of a female performer dolled up as Alice in Wonderland, another chap puts on a White Rabbit costume, and there are scenes of violence and graphically simulated sex on a dining room table.

The sublime How Soon is Now? becomes the song of an abusive husband, swigging booze from the bottle and terrorising his family, an interpretation presumably prompted by the opening words, "You shut your mouth." But this reading entirely ignores the aching, awkward tenderness of a number that subsequently declares: "I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does."

Barbarism Begins at Home more aptly combines images of domestic violence with a frenzied tap-dancing routine, and there is an arresting image in Asleep when the entire cast huddles up on top of each other as they try to capture forty winks' respite from the prevailing angst.

But, for the most part, the songs have remarkably little connection to the desultory action on a stage permanently engulfed in penumbral twilight. Why is that woman swinging from a trapeze? Why are we watching a video of two hands making a cat's cradle? Why are we enduring this rubbish at all? God knows.

The lyrics are often inaudible, and fans of the Smiths will loathe the arty-farty new arrangements. Though they are competent singers, none of the performers succeeds in establishing a strong stage personality amid the directorial self-indulgence, though Sean Kingsley offers a hint of thuggish menace, and Katrine Lunde provides some much needed torch-song glamour.

At the end of the show, one of the performers shoots all the others dead, putting them, and us, out of our collective misery. It's just as well. By that stage, I was perilously close to strangling the entire company myself.

Until July 23. Tickets: 08700 500511