Plenty of plays - no, the majority of plays written - are best left to moulder in peace after their first staging. Once is quite enough. Once is one time too many for Shaw's 1921 epic, which begins in 4004BC with Adam and Eve losing their innocence, and moves forward through time to AD31920, where babies are hatched out of eggs into a brave new world.
By the age of four, humans have got love, sex and fun out of the way and metamorphose into pure thought. This sterile, scary, loveless but presumably wise world where the ancients speak like Daleks and look like very pale Ancient Egyptians is called Arcadia. You are not entirely sure that Shaw is being ironic. He was not big on the merits of sensuality and emotional intelligence.
There may be something in the idea that we do not live long enough to achieve wisdom, but as is so often the case with Shaw, he makes a mountain out of a molehill. For all the flashes of wit, mockery of politicians and fantastical weirdness, the sheer number of words is out of all proportion to the message.
Shaw called his play a "metabiological pentateuch" and grandiosely likened it to Wagner's Ring cycle. In its original form it would last around 10 hours. Director David Fielding has done Shaw a huge favour by trimming it to four hours, although the Reduced Shakespeare version might be even more agreeable.
Fielding's intelligent, but sometimes irritatingly camp, production (Adam and Eve wear Barbie wigs), treats the play as if it were a sci-fi saga and sets it in a laboratory where white-coated technicians are conducting a series of experiments. The parade of intellectuals, puffed-up politicians, Chinese sages, Napoleon and ancients with beehive craniums are treated with a comic irreverence that makes Shaw's pontificating rather more bearable. The acting is commendable, as if the actors actually believe the hokum they are spouting.
If you were confident of living for 300 years, Shaw's play would be one way of filling the time, but as most of us are unlikely to reach treble figures, four hours of this is too much.
Until April 5. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
