"Champagne and tears" was Henry James's description of La Dame aux Camelias by Dumas fils. But watching Neil Bartlett's deliberately deromanticised version I was reminded more of lager and chips. While there is fascination in seeing a great myth deconstructed, I sometimes felt the baby had disappeared with the bathwater.
Going back to the original, Bartlett is at great pains to point out the commercial nature of Marguerite Gautier's existence.
When Armand Duval declares his passion for her, her initial response is: "Well, I hope you can afford me." And, to counter the stock image of Marguerite as a graciously wasting icon, he has her hurl flowers to the floor, cry "fuck piano lessons" and, after coughing up blood, ask "one tart more or less, what difference does it make?"
But the problem with rubbing our noses in prostitution and tuberculosis is that it only serves to heighten the story's romantic core. However much you emphasise Marguerite's temperamental coarseness or grave sickness, you cannot disguise the fact she sacrifices her love for Armand, at his father's behest, to protect the family name. Her gesture is in the great tradition of 19th-century fiction. Once you strip away the romantic trappings, you raise awkward questions such as why Armand so gullibly believes Marguerite's denial of their love.
In short, there is an unresolved contradiction at the heart of Bartlett's version in which realism is at war with romance.
But, that said, the retrospective narrative framework allows scenes to melt fluidly into each other. And David McVicar pursues the directorial approach he has lately employed in Rigoletto by subordinating pictorial grace to emotional truth.
In Nicky Gillibrand's design the scenes erupt in a sombre world of chairs, chaises longues and swagged drapes.
The casting also deliberately contradicts romantic stereotype. Daniela Nardini's Marguerite is no willowy Garboesque figure but a big-boned, short-haired woman who sometimes suggests she's left her lacrosse sticks in the hall. But, while her performance is absolutely faithful to the directorial vision, I sometimes missed the quality Shaw found in Duse of exquisite consideration.
Elliot Cowan also makes Armand a hollow-eyed obsessive whose love smacks of neurosis. And there are strongly defined performances from Beverley Klein as a predatory milliner and Paul Shelley as an unusually ferocious Duval pere. The end result is a mixed evening: one that reminds us that sex in 19th-century Paris was reduced to a commercial transaction. But that cannot escape the self-sacrificial gesture that gives the story its timeless appeal.
· Until April 12. Box office: 020-8741 2311
