Peter Whelan's excellent new play has made the standard journey from Stratford's Other Place to the Barbican's Pit. But what will happen to new writing of this calibre now that the Stratford venue is closed and the Royal Shakespeare Company is abandoning the idea of a permanent London base? I suspect we shall get ambitious "projects", such as the upcoming adaptation of Midnight's Children, but that the regular turnover of new plays will cease.
Whelan's play is his seventh for the RSC, and it is one of his best. Set in Berlin in 1950, it is a semi-autobiographical evocation of national service experience and an attack on the cold war imperative to demonise the enemy. With Le Carré-like skill, it shows a raw young conscript left to guard a Charlottenburg education centre for a fateful weekend. First a Pandarus-like sergeant tries to get him into bed with the centre's German secretary; when that fails, the hero naively invites an American soldier back for a late-night drink.
"Frontiers are made for crossing," says the seeming American at one stage. Whelan's point, though, is that the sexual, military and political barriers of the early 1950s prohibited spontaneous human contact. Wire fences, both literal and metaphorical, prevent the hero reaching out to a Russian soldier and a homosexual comrade. Even culture is subsumed into the cold war battle: since part of the hero's mission is to indoctrinate young squaddies in the superiority of Shakespeare, his private passion for Turgenev and Chekhov is seen as inherently suspect. Whelan re-creates dark times with gripping precision.
My one gripe is that Robert Delamere's production allows some of the actors to indulge in the kind of restless physicality that often passes for high energy. Louis Hilyer as the local pimp and Douglas Rao as the visiting American both need to calm down. But Anthony Flanagan, in his professional debut, is first-rate as the hero struggling to find his identity in an alien world, and there is impeccable support from Anna Madeley as the traumatised secretary and Colin Mace as a bull-necked staff sergeant. See Whelan's play while you can: it may, for all we know, be one of the last in a historic RSC line.
· In rep until April 13. Box office: 020 7638 8891.
