Arthur Schnitzler's Professor Bernhardi, a searing portrait of Viennese antisemitism, was one of last year's major discoveries. Now the Arcola hosts Schnitzler's first play, Anatol (1892). It's one of the author's more characteristic studies of sexual promiscuity, and led Freud to write to him wondering "from where you were able to draw that secret knowledge which I have had to acquire through laborious investigation".
The answer can only be through Schnitzler's own rigorous self-analysis, for these linked one-act plays involving a philandering hero, his faithful friend and a variety of Viennese women offer an unsparing account of male egoism and insecurity. Anatol hypnotises one mistress to test her fidelity only to back off from the big question. He stages a lavish farewell supper for an unwanted lover and is then outraged to find that he is the one being given the push. He even rekindles an old flame on the eve of his wedding and is shocked into self-awareness by her incandescent fury.
It is hard to think of any dramatist, even Strindberg, who wrote so honestly about 19th-century sex. Even though these playlets seem short on social detail, Schnitzler pins down brilliantly the self-regard, lassitude and frivolous melancholy of the upper-class Viennese male. In contrast, the women, however victimised, possess either a spitfire rage or a Cressida-like capacity for deception. And, although Schnitzler developed his ideas more fully in Reigen (La Ronde), these plays convey the ephemeral sadness of the amoral life. At one point in Carl Mueller's translation, Anatol's confidant, Max, memorably observes: "There's a happiness that starts to die in the first kiss."
I only wish that Thomas Hescott's revival, for Back to Back productions, were a shade less frenetic; the suppertime showdown between Anatol and his old lover suggests more a four-ale bar than a classy Viennese restaurant. But Sam Hodges catches nicely the narcissistic hedonism of the drifting hero. Andrew Fallaize as his friend combines surface disapproval of Anatol's games with a sense of envious, Leperello-like complicity. Best of all is Anna Francolini, who, playing Anatol's endless lovers, captures both their seething rage and mercurial independence.
But it is the play rather than the performance that matters. Schnitzler, a practising doctor and neurologist, pins down a particular Viennese fin-de-siècle sickness. He also nails the ultimate human illusion: that irresponsible pleasure makes men happy.
· Until March 18. Box office: 020-7503 1646.
