I can tell you one thing about the German dramatist Roland Schimmelpfennig: he enjoys scaling the heights. In Push Up, his satire on corporate capitalism seen at the Royal Court in February, everyone aspired to the executive suite on the 16th floor. Now in this delightful fable, set in a European city on a sweltering June night, he shows that the 7th floor of a residential tower block can be a source of magic realism.
Imagine the tale spinning Scheherazade of Arabian Nights crossed with Hitchcock and you get some idea of the tone of this 75 minute play. A rhapsodic voyeur is smitten by a girl in the opposite apartment in an obvious echo of Rear Window. And when the lady in question, Franziska, relives her childhood fears of being abducted in a bazaar we seem to be into The Man Who Knew Too Much. But since she is a sleeping beauty who stirs the erotic dreams of a shy caretaker and who imagines she is being pursued by a sheikh's wife we are also in the realm of oriental fantasy.
We are so used to seeing urban life depicted as a mix of sleaze and ennui that Schimmelpfennig's play comes as a pleasurable shock. He suggests, with a delicate wit that stops well short of whimsy, that the modern city is a multicultural melting pot filled with strange dreams and desires. True, he plays on fears of being trapped in a lift or finding the taps have run dry above the 7th floor. But his general point in this contemporary tenement fantasy is that the stories of the east invade the imaginations of the west on midsummer nights.
Even if the play offers an idealised view of city life, it comes across seductively in David Tushingham's translation and Gordon Anderson's imaginative Actors Touring Company production. The busy Es Devlin, who has just designed another story of east-west encounters in the RSC Antony and Cleopatra, also excels herself: she creates a sandstone city full of twinkling, miniaturised tower blocks and even creates the effect of a peeping tom trapped in a brandy bottle.
Sam Cox as the lonely caretaker, Anna Hope as the narcoleptic beauty and Steph- anie Street as her vengeful flatmate also make you feel that Schimmelpfennig's dream city is a place you would like to visit.
· Until May 11. Box office: 020-7478 0100
