I can't think of a better marriage of talent than this: five short stories by Raymond Carver adapted and directed by William Gaskill. Carver, famed for his stylistic minimalism, finds his ideal interpreter in a veteran director, undertaking his first professional production in 10 years, who has an equal dislike of false ornamentation.
While most literary adaptation is reductive, Carver's stories gain by being staged; you see this most clearly in the pick of this bunch, Put Yourself in My Shoes. A writer and his wife go for Christmas drinks at a house they once rented; what should be an amiable occasion is transformed by the host into a chance for vindictive retribution. But the clenched anger of Bruce Alexander as the host, looking like Eric Morecambe and sounding like WC Fields, adds an extra dimension to the story: even a simple question like "What did you write today, may I ask?" acquires a note of withering contempt.
Gaskill brings out Carver's essential theatricality without destroying his mystery. In one of the most famous stories a nervous host, having signally failed to explain to his blind guest what a cathedral looks like, allows his hand to be guided in drawing one; as played by Alexander and Jack Klaff, the moment acquires its own metaphorical resonance suggesting that art is a matter of the blind leading the tongue-tied. And in a story like What's in Alaska? you see Carver's Chekhovian gift for articulating the unspoken: as Mark Carroll and Melisande Cook play a young couple visiting neighbours to share the communal joys of their new hookah you hear a marriage quietly disintegrating.
Only one story, Intimacy, in which an ex-wife confronts her exploitative husband, seems over-explicit.
John Updike once wrote of Carver's "existential determination to let things speak out of their own silence". That is exactly what comes across in Gaskill's immaculately cast production.
· Until August 6. Box office: 020-7503 1646.
