"In the USA, you can work your way to the head of the line," sings Leon Czolgosz, the killer of President McKinley, in a jauntily ironic folk-ballad in Stephen Sondheim's Assassins. Eric Schlosser's play opens with the same incident: Czolgosz putting a bullet through McKinley's heart at the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo in 1901.
Given American drama's domestic bias, it is refreshing to find a play dealing with public issues. Like Sondheim, Schlosser is not averse to irony. The central one here is that, far from ending the US's military imperialism, Czolgosz furthered it by ushering in the neo-Roman presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. And, although the assassin was driven by a hatred of power and privilege, all the evidence suggests that McKinley was a decent man who eschewed pomp and was devoted to his epileptic wife.
Cutting between the browbeaten Czolgosz in his cell and the wider political stage, Schlosser's play is densely informative: it captures the crude buoyancy of early 20th-century America and its determination to replace Britain as the world's leading imperial power. Schlosser also shows how the press and law treated Czolgosz as a lone assassin and ignored his libertarian principles. But Schlosser fails to place Czolgosz in his full revolutionary context: unlike Sondheim, he does not show his crucial meeting with anarchist Emma Goldman and neglects to point out the spate of assassinations of European heads of state at the turn of the century.
Schlosser says his models were Shakespeare and Camus; what you actually get is a workmanlike exposition of the US's pretensions to imperial ascendancy and of the existence of a permanent, suppressed opposition. The play is effectively directed by Dominic Dromgoole for the Oxford Stage Company. Figures loom out of the darkness on the Arcola's crypt-like stage, and there is good work from Bo Paraj as the assassin, David Ganly as his xenophobic jailer and John Dougall as Roosevelt's expansionist intellectual guru. You learn a lot, but wish that Schlosser's dramatic means were as radical as his political message.
· Until November 22. Box office: 020-7503 1646.
