Paul Warwick’s direction is invisible and that’s the way it should be.Static forms the second half, but the first is a world apart. Where Static offers genuine, concerned commentary on the world, Clean is a self-fulfilling knees-up, a thespian in-joke, a play about a play about… When Genet explored the two Parisian maids who murdered and mutilated their employer, it may have been shocking, it may have been fertile dramatic ground. But to revisit their homicidal, lesbian chic isolationism in 2001, smacks of just the kind of self-abuse planned in Static.These two weird sisters may have created their own fantasy basement world, but there is more to “alternative realities” than mere trawls through Roget’s Thesaurus, each sister repetitively rephrasing the other. There is more to paranoid delusion than silly voices and headscarves and Mr Sheen and tea slurping contests. As the two love-starved girls, Liz Margree and Louisa Ashley seemed to be having a great time.

They were, sadly, alone.Static confirms everything that the fringe does well: pared down, unpretentious and, as a result, moving. Clean demonstrates everything that gives it a bad name: self-indulgent, romping, utterly pointless.To Sat, 020-8237 1111. Dwelling on the moon can be a dangerous business: Neil Armstrong would confirm that, and so would the poet Robert Graves, who wrote to a friend that he was growing worried “by thinking about poetry and finding that all the poems one thinks of as most poetic in the romantic style are all.. connected with primitive moon-worship. This sounds crazy, and I fear for my sanity, but it is so…”

Dwelling on the moon can be a dangerous business: Neil Armstrong would confirm that, and so would the poet Robert Graves, who wrote to a friend that he was growing worried “by thinking about poetry and finding that all the poems one thinks of as most poetic in the romantic style are all.. connected with primitive moon-worship. This sounds crazy, and I fear for my sanity, but it is so…”
Suppressing his misgivings, Graves carried on with this curious line of speculation and produced his epic mythological treatise The White Goddess, one of the great “crazy” books of the 20th century, which argues (to simplify a grander, more tortuously presented case) that the poetic impulse has its origins in acts of homage to a primal lunar she-deity with a hundred faces: Astarte, Isis, Selene, Artemis, Hecate…Graves still has his followers, especially among mystically inclined feminists, who warm to his evocations of a lost matriarchal order, but today, an undergraduate who turned in essays following the Gravesian line on poetic inspiration would be sent off for a spell of brutal re-education at a new historicist boot camp. Lunar exploration of the cultural kind needs to be approached with caution.

Still, one does not have to swallow Graves’s belief system wholesale to agree with his suggestion that there is indeed a strikingly intimate relationship between, if not all poetry, then at least Romantic poetry and the moon.An exhaustive cultural history of the moon would require a volume of White Goddess dimensions and would encompass matter from anthropology and folklore, astronomy and astrology, abnormal psychology and seamanship. But it’s possible to indicate some of the richness of this vast subject by examining the background to Graves’s hint, since an anthology of lunar musings by just the English Romantic poets would already be a sizeable volume.It would have to include, for example, Blake’s satirical squib “An Island in the Moon” (partly inspired, some have suggested, by the Lunar Society of free-thinkers, which met on nights of the full moon), as well as his drawing of a “Moon Ark” and that famous, mysterious image of cosmic yearning that shows a vast ladder being propped against the moon, above the caption: “I want! I want!”The collection would also have to include Wordsworth’s two (alas, rather feeble) poems of 1837 addressed to the moon, as well as his more eloquent evocation in The Prelude of the white satellite as “… the emblem of a mind/ That feeds upon infinity, that broods/ Over the dark abyss…”Our anthology would certainly have to embrace large quantities of work by Shelley, in whose household mythology Mary Shelley played the moon to his earth (“She led me to a cave in that wild place/ And sat beside me, with her downward face/ Illumining my slumbers, like the Moon/ Waxing and waning o’er Endymion…”; of course, the imaginary collection would also draw on Keats’s Endymion), and who composed a couple of lyric fragments that used to be familiar to every schoolchild made to learn poetry by rote:Art thou pale for wearinessOf climbing heaven and gazing on theearth,Wandering companionlessAmong the stars that have a different birth,And ever changing, like a joyless eyeThat finds no object worth its constancy?Above all, the hypothetical gathering would be crammed with gleanings from the prose and poetry of Coleridge, quite the most moon-smitten of all his moony English brethren (though he has a close rival on the far side of the Alps, in the Italian poet Leopardi, who could hardly bear to keep the moon out of his stanzas). In his wonderful biography, Richard Holmes records an episode in Malta when Coleridge actually performed an involuntary Gravesian act of worship to the huge Mediterranean moon.