I wanted to get involved in Shelley Silas's new play, but the director and designer made it damnably difficult. Instead of wrapping the audience round the action, as in a recent Doll's House at this address, they placed us in front of it, as if we were looking through a wide-angled letter-box. The result was that I could never see the entire stage, and found that a constantly craned neck is unconducive to emotional empathy.
A pity, because Silas is here dealing with an intriguingly unfamiliar subject: crumbling family structures in Calcutta's Jewish community. The action revolves around a dying matriarch, Mozelle, whose two expatriate daughters rush to her rickety bedside. But the sibling rivalry between the Anglicised Esther and the Americanised Silvie is temporarily ended when they discover, to their horror, that their mother's young companion is in fact their half-sister.
A faint air of Dodie Smith, and lavendered family drama, hangs over proceedings, but the unusual context provides its own stimulus. Silas skilfully points up the contradictions in the surviving Jewish community. Mozelle preaches the importance of tradition and continuity while having, in her youth, enjoyed an affair with an employee in her husband's pickle factory. And the explosive information about her secret love-child ironically emerges during ritual Friday-night religious celebrations.
Given that there are now only 30 Indian Jews living in Calcutta, Silas's play emerges as an elegiac hymn to a disappearing world. Its emphasis on reconciliation and harmony also lends it as an unsual sweetness of temper. And Shelley King as the secular, coke-snorting Silvie, Harvey Virdi as the north London emigre nursing her own hidden desires, and Jamila Massey as the bedbound matriarch arguing for the preservation of Jewish identity all give strongly defined performances. But Janet Steel's Kali Theatre production has done Silas's quietly moving play few favours by turning us into periscope-necked spectators rather than intimate eavesdroppers.
· Until February 28. Box office: 020-7620 3494. Then touring.
