Hampstead Theatre has had a rough ride lately but salvation has come from America. After the summer's excellent Yellowman we have this fascinating import by Nilo Cruz which admits us to a whole new cultural world: that of the Cuban emigres who settled in Florida and created their own cigar factories.
The setting is a family business in 1929 Tampa. The catalyst among the cigar-rollers is the visiting lector: a hired hand engaged to keep the workers happy by reading fiction to them. In this case the handsome lector chooses Anna Karenina, with predictably disturbing results. Before you can say Leo Tolstoy, one of the owner's two daughters, the unhappily married Conchita, is playing Anna to the visitor's Vronsky while the other finds herself the object of her step-uncle's perverted passions.
Cruz is intriguingly equivocal about the power of literature: for the women it opens up new horizons but for the men, resentful of the lector's privileged charisma, it stirs jealousy and hatred. But Cruz's real success lies in pinning down a moment of cultural change. We are watching a vanishing tradition about to be replaced by mechanisation; the moment when the latest brand of hand-rolled cigar is savoured as reverently as a wine-maker's fresh vintage acquires the pathos of a disappearing rite.
Admittedly the play's weaknesses are inseparable from its virtues. Once the lector chooses Tolstoy's tale of adultery, you sit back and wait to see its patterns enacted. And the disruptive newcomer is a stock figure in American drama. But Cruz's strength is that the action is rooted in a world of work where a cigar is an object of familial pride.
Indhu Rubasingham's production strongly affirms the play's sense of community: against Liz Ascroft's filmy backdrop of receding telegraph poles we seem to be watching tensions erupt inside a real family. Rachael Stirling's Conchita, with her exquisitely fluttering hands, is visibly plagued by marital misery. Joseph Mydell as her gambling dad and Diana Quick as her grandiose mum are initially detached figures drawn together by crisis.
Even if Enzo Cilenti's lector remains an enigmatic man in a white suit, Peter Polycarpou as the predatory step-uncle and Lorraine Burroughs as his victimised niece are perfectly in key.
· Until January 8. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
