High-rise housing may be out of fashion, but Michael Frayn's 1984 architectural comedy stands up excellently to revival. Ostensibly this is a play about buildings. In reality it is about our attempt to impose structure on a resistant universe and, in particular, about the fallibility of liberal idealism.
Frayn presents us with two couples domestically intertwined. David is a visionary architect who plans to turn the decaying, Victorian Basuto Road into a civic utopia with high-rise blocks built around a courtyard. His wife Jane is an efficient superwoman who doubles as his helpmate and surrogate social worker. The problem is that David and Jane treat their neighbours Colin and Sheila - a mockingly sardonic journalist and his oppressed wife - as if they were another site in urgent need of development. And it is David's well-meaning employment of Sheila as a secretary that leads to his ruination.
There are obvious echoes of Ibsen. Like Solness in The Master Builder, David dreams of "homes for people" without understanding their needs. And, as with Gregers Werle in The Wild Duck, David and Jane's do-gooding disastrously rebounds. But, as in all Frayn's work, there is a philosophical contest between order and chaos. What liberals such as David do not allow for is either people's sentimental attachment to the past or the destructiveness of individuals like Colin: there is a comic moment when David, well aware that Colin is out to wreck his plans, still treats him with the polite attentiveness of the perfect host.
This is the kind of attack on liberalism that only a liberal could have written; like all Frayn's best work, it ripples with irony and intelligence. My one caveat is that it lacks any overriding visual metaphor. In contrast to Michael Annals's original twin-homed set, Robert Jones's design here places all the action around a table at the centre of an echoing memory-chamber. But even that can't quite compensate for the fact that Frayn describes more than he shows - contrast Ibsen who gives us a concrete vision of Solness's architectural dreams.
But Jeremy Sams's production is fast, fluid and cuts effortlessly between past and present. It also contains an outstanding performance from Aden Gillett. As David, he is full of flustered, myopic optimism and he even guiltily apologises when he discovers that Sheila has long been in love with him. Emma Chambers's Sheila has the right tyrannising helplessness and both Neil Pearson as the smoothly satanic Colin and Sylvestra le Touzel as the reflexively beneficent Jane make their decisive mark. A new Frayn play would be welcome. In the meantime this is exactly the kind of mind-expanding comedy the West End urgently needs.
· Until September 28. Box office: 020-7369 1740.
