Theatre night:One.

A man stands in a side doorway of Battersea Arts Centre, his jeans and his red boxer shorts are pulled down to knee length, and his bare arse is facing out at the audience. With a hand on each of them he pulls his bum cheeks so far apart that one observer suggests his heavily bearded and taciturn colleague perform a prostate examination upon him.

I've already witnessed a man refusing to come down from a ladder while another man kicks at it, a man kneeling on a table slapping his backside repeatedly and shouting, between self-administired spanks, "ow", while also bearing witness to some very enthusiastic, if somewhat amateur, dancing and some pauses so elongated that Harold Pinter would start to feel uncomfortable.

What was going on? On one level I had absolutely no idea. Or at least very little. On a more basic level I was at the Battersea Arts Centre watching One. A play, of sorts, in which Bertrand Lesca (he of the splayed arse) and Nasi Voutsas (owner of the hirsute chin) indulge in humour, brutality, and, most terrifying of all, clowning. Nobody wants to witness clowning. It's neither fun nor funny.  

Though when I write that 'nobody' wants to witness clowning what I mean is that I, personally, have no desire to witness clowning. In that, it turned out, I was very alone. At least in the company of my fellow BAC patrons. The vast majority of whom were a great deal younger than me (as most people are now). In fact I'm pretty certain a local sixth form college had bused a load of kids in as part of their further education to see Bert and Nasi larking about.

It's quite a strange choice and some of the boys didn't seem overly pleased to be presented with a naked male bum. One was a 'relaxed performance' which meant that chatting in the audience, interaction with the cast, and coming and going as you please was not only permitted but encouraged. When the arse was revealed several, clearly resolutely heterosexual, young men decided to excuse themselves temporarily.

The performance began with Nasi up a stepladder listening to Peter Rodriguez's boogaloo anthem I Like It Like That before Bert comes on stage and encourages the audience to goad Nasi down from his ladder. This takes some time and involves chat with audience members (sometimes humorous, often a little cringe inducing) and some lengthy periods of staring and stony silence.

There's some arguing about whether or not sitting on a chair is important or not, a debate with various audience members to see if they like Nasi or not or if Bert needs 'help', the aforementioned spanking, and later displaying, of Bert's arse, some hand holding, and a choice that we the audience had to make between three different endings.

A bad ending (which involves not just the arse but the stuff that comes out of it), a boring ending (which they threaten will last 'til Saturday), or a good ending which involves dancing, tuxedos, and flying. The last of which is, of course, impossible.

By this point, however, we all know that Bert and Nasi are simultaneously not to be trusted to keep their word but are to be trusted to be reasonably entertaining. Though not hilarious. Not to me anyway, though the guy next to me and many others were doubling up. The gist of this, of what I guess you'd call physical theatre, and the motivation for the piece seemed to be the perils of communication.

How sometimes, often even, it's impossible to know what someone else is thinking, what their agenda is, or to get across to someone else what you're thinking or, indeed, hide what you don't want them to know. I'm not totally convinced it was best served by an hour long run through of set pieces mixed with improvised asides that struck me as a Vic'n'Bob routine as if scripted by Samuel Becket and then performed by Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson in the guise of pretentious art students but it wasn't as bad as it sounds - and it sounds really bad.

There was warmth in the style of both Bert and Nasi, not least when they turned their sad eyes to the audience in desperation, despair, or resignation, and some parts were genuinely funny - if not as funny as the millennials and students surrounding me found it. I'm surprised something like this is as popular as it is. That could be because I'm a superannuated old fuddy-duddy or it could be that, in reality, Bert and Nasi, the former at one point in an almost very real way, were done up in the Emperor's New Clothes.

The truth, I suspect, lies between both those things. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. If I didn't really understand a play about the inability to communicate then that's probably part of the point of it, isn't it?