Every director reinvents Strindberg's A Dream Play. But Katie Mitchell has gone even further than Robert Lepage and Robert Wilson. She offers her own idiosyncratic take not only on Strindberg's 1901 play but on Caryl Churchill's slimline new version; and while I don't feel a masterpiece has been desecrated, the result is technical virtuosity shorn of emotional content.
What Mitchell has done is shift the narrative focus. In Strindberg's play Agnes, daughter of the god Indra, descends to earth only to find life is a vale of tears. But here, although Agnes is present as a visiting angel, the pivotal figure is a 50s London stockbroker called Alfred. The action consists of a hurtling journey through his private dreamscape in which he searches for his lost wife and the meaning of life, yearns for his dying mother, witnesses love's decay and finds himself a harassed, solitary outsider.
The result is to change the play's meaning and perspective. By seeing the action through Agnes's eyes, Strindberg showed that "human beings are to be pitied" but capable of divine redemption. But, if you take away the religious framework and marginalise Agnes, you are left with an individual dream. More specifically, I felt I was watching an actor's nightmare. It is no accident that Alfred constantly finds himself surrounded by the corps de ballet in Giselle or that he exists in a world of destablised furniture, unreliable props and speeded-up action. A Virgilian portrait of human sadness has been diluted into a private fantasy.
Undeniably it is executed with great skill by Mitchell's 10-strong company;they become stockbrokers, angels, dancers, mourners, children at the drop of a hat. Some of the visual effects are also brilliant; at one point rocking desks evoke a turbulent sea. And Angus Wright as Alfred conveys not only the fierce vexation of a dream but sadness as he watches two lovers commit to a suicide-pact on their wedding-day.
But, although Strindberg said a single consciousness should hold sway over the play's dislocated action, I believe he intended it to be the author's rather than that of the director or a single character.
I felt far closer to Strindberg's feverish, disordered imagination looking at his sea-paintings at Tate Modern than I did watching Mitchell's capriciously inventive production.
· Until May 11. Box office: 020-7452 3000
