In Chekhov's The Seagull, the main characters end up playing lotto while offstage Konstantin shoots himself. Something similar happens in this Dutch touring show from Theatregroep Flint in that, while the audience enjoys itself in Ricardo's Bingo Palace, an ancillary drama about Mafia violence erupts among the staff. It's fun while it lasts, but I have to say Chekhov wins hands down when it comes to the use of number games as a dramatic device.
The basic joke in the Dutch show is that we ourselves become punters in a fictive bingo parlour. We sit at long refectory tables under the beady gaze of the Russian Anna who turns the process of calling numbers into a lugubrious personal commentary: "Fifty-six - half a lifetime of loneliness," she cries with weary desperation. But, while we are supposedly keeping our eyes down, our nervous host, Ricardo, is frantically answering phone-calls revealing he is in hock to his Mafia boss. Panic sets in among the gradually disappearing multi-national staff - until the calling is finally left in the hands of the sadly innumerate Fatima, who holds up each ball for our inspection.
As a demonstration of controlled chaos, Lidwien Roothaan's production is inventively effective. The actress who plays Anna is also unforgettable: she has a stare that a basilisk would envy, and a shock of orange-coloured hair that stands up like quills upon the fretful porpentine. But at only one point does the show raise any interesting questions about our own complicity in this fictional gamble. That comes at the end, when the winner of the £100 jackpot is asked to hand back the bulk of her prize to pay off the Mafia boss: the lucky lady's evident reluctance to do so, on opening night, could be be construed either as part of a Pirandellian confusion between art and life, or as proof that we have all become inveterate gamblers.
I wish the show taxed us a little more morally: bingo, after all, can either be seen as a harmless pastime or as a metaphor for a casino society. There is also just the faintest touch of condescension about a largely young, hip audience indulging in what is often seen as a working-class OAP recreation. But, even if the evening ducks most of the big questions, the company recreates the atmosphere of a travelling bingo palace with exuberantly raffish enthusiasm.
· Until September 8. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
