Steve Trafford's play takes us back to the Futurists: specifically to the attempt to reconstruct poetry and art in the wake of the Russian revolution. But even if Trafford's hero, Vladimir Mayakovsky, remains an enigma, the play makes a fascinating companion-piece to Nikolai Erdman's The Mandate playing down the road at the National.
Trafford focuses on the attempt of Mayakovsky and his pals to achieve a revolution in art, sex and politics. In 1917 the noisy poet-playwright, who wears his tie on his shoulder and his heart on his sleeve, meets up with the Muscovite editor, Osip Brik, and his wife, Lili. And when Osip uses Lili to persuade the poet to join the party, a meeting of minds quickly turns into a ménage à trois. As Lili says: "We change nothing if we can't change ourselves." But although the threesome precariously works and Mayakovsky enjoys literary fame under Lenin, everything changes after Stalin's accession culminating in the poet's suicide in 1930.
The best feature of the play is that it gives us generous helpings of Mayakovsky's poetry: the title itself stems from a famous line in which the poet defined himself as, in Peter Conrad's words, "a volatile spirit materialising on level ground, mystery clad in buffoonery". But what Trafford never makes clear is how much Mayakovsky was a committed revolutionary and how much an anarchic individualist. He wrote a paean to Lenin and hymned the steel-workers of Kursk. But you get the impression his talent was for lyricism and satire.
Dusty Hughes's Futurists gave us a richer portrait of the period. But Trafford's play is a lively study of love among the artists and of the recurrence of bourgeois possessiveness even among a group of self-conscious Bohemians. Jointly presented by Ensemble and York Theatre Royal, Damien Cruden's production, punctuated by captions from Mayakovsky's poetry, also has verve. John Sackville catches the hero's manic excitability. Elizabeth Mansfield's Lili has a bright-eyed fervour that enables her to overcome lines like, "Isn't great writing always a response to pain?"
And Mark Payton's Osip is the born survivor who sups with the Futurists while working for the secret police.
Even if the politics are only briefly sketched in, the play leaves one in no doubt about the failure of the revolutionary dream and persuades one Mayakovsky was a considerable poet.
· Until November 20. Box office: 020-7620 3494.
