Whitehouse Institute at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

When a vicar stands up to give a sermon to a congregation, it doesn't usually get classed as drama. The drama lies outside of what the vicar says and outside of where it's said; out in the supernatural world.

When a tour rep stands up to greet their latest batch of tourists, it doesn't usually get classed as drama. The drama lies in the proposed holiday, the land waiting to be explored – the world outside of the tour rep's speech.

Both vicar and tour rep have learnt a set of words, ready to present to those listening to them. Their listeners hope to gain something from what they hear. The crowd has gathered to listen to them, and though the division between them is more informal than a theatre's normal fourth wall, there is still a noticeable degree of separation between them. It's not any different to a guided tour in an art gallery – like the one on offer at the Holbeck recently. As drama or theatre, the speeches given by curator Neil Bailey-Jones are barely different to those given by a vicar in church.

Such people are also less keen on witholding the secrets of their craft; in fact, conveying information is vital to their occupations. But the Manchester team behind Whitehouse Institute have been trying – with varying degrees of success – to impose a blanket of silence over their show. There's a big twist, that they'd like to keep from the Fest-going body – us lot, their audience. How they expect people not to talk about the show – at NSDF – is hard to grasp. By the way, the twist is the new artwork being replaced by a stark naked woman.

In some ways, it's a tired and worn-out idea that modern art as a movement is pointless and/or pretentious while its artists are too far up themselves to know anything of the outside world. Whitehouse Institute exposes this truism by parading it with glee. The curators of modern galleries also get gently satirised as people stuffed full of commonplace fact – this one leads a tour of the bleedingly obvious around the Uni campus – but that's another shallow idea, one that loses its humour value after being used more than twice. So at over an hour, that joke wore very thin.

Whitehouse Institute almost goes one better than these tired old art debates by giving protesters a voice – but absolutely no attempt at giving a clear, unified reason for the protest. It manages to expose that those oppose modern art as having no valid alternative to that which so aggravates them. There isn't exactly any original or interesting insight on these themes; merely a presentation of them that claims to be drama but fails to scale any such heights.

In fact, any audience member (and, yes, we punters were 'audience members', not 'gallery viewers' or any other such term) who wanted some drama out of their National Student Drama Festival's offering would have had more luck attending happenings outside of the event to which their paid-for ticket entitles them entry. By far the most interesting things happened outside of the gallery (protesters rattling the doors) and indeed outside of the event itself (the protests staged outside of the SJT). The Manchester team is to be commended on their marketing and publicity campaign (including articles – tying into the fiction of Tracey Hutcheson – in our own NOFF), which has become bigger than the performance itself. Or, then again, has the publicity become (part of?) the event?

On the down-side, such hype meant that the only way that Whitehouse Institute could have not been an anti-climax was if the protesters had burnt the gallery to the ground. Now that would have been a twist worth keeping hidden.