Pirandello's plays, said a critic, are a single drama in 100 acts. And indeed the Sicilian master constantly returns to the same themes: relativity of truth, fluidity of identity, deceptiveness of reality. But while they all surface in this rarely-seen 1930 piece, beautifully directed by Jonathan Kent, I found it stimulated my theatrical appetite without wholly satisfying it.
Its plot certainly intrigues. The focal character, cryptically named the Unknown Woman, is a dubious Berlin chanteuse who lives with a rich hack and his lesbian daughter. One night a stranger arrives, claiming she is really the wife of Bruno, an Italian aristo, and disappeared for 10 years after a savage wartime rape. Whisked off to Bruno's Italian villa, the heroine duly becomes his lost Lucia. But when her Berlin lover turns up with a madwoman purporting to be the authentic Lucia, the heroine's identity is once more in question.
For all the Pirandellian mystery, the play's point emerges clearly in Hugh Whitemore's elegant new version: all identity is an artificial construct depending on the faith and love of others. At one point the heroine looks at Bruno and admits she has created herself according to the image in his eyes and only exists "as you desire me". But, while I accept Pirandello's philosophy, I question his theatrical profligacy. In a play with 14 characters, he creates only one real role. Unlike Shakespeare, Schiller or Ibsen, he fails to imbue his lesser figures with independent life; which is why he lacks true greatness.
Everything hinges on the heroine; and, following in Garbo's footsteps, Kristin Scott Thomas here does a mostly impressive job. I felt there was something a touch dutiful about her sleazy Berlin singer drunkenly draping herself over the furniture in a diaphanous dress. She seems more at home posing as an Italian aristo's wife; and what she brings out excellently is the character's enigmatic mix of outward serenity and spiritual isolation.
Paul Brown's design, meanwhile, is equally good at suggesting the metallic ugliness of 1930s Berlin and the marble stateliness of an Italian villa. And a strong cast compensate for the thinness of Pirandello's characterisation. Bob Hoskins as the heroine's bullet-headed Berlin lover suggests a perkier version of von Stroheim. Finbar Lynch lends Bruno's agent of truth a bespectacled intensity. And down at the villa there is good work from John Carlisle and Margaret Tyzack as a senior couple determined to believe in Lucia's reality. But, running at a bare 90 minutes, Pirandello's play tantalises one intellectually while leaving one emotionally hungry.
· Until January 19. Box office: 020-7839 4292
