Film noir has had a huge influence on writers from Dennis Potter and David Hare to Larry Gelbart in Broadway's City of Angels. But the problem with Cue Deadly, a "film live on stage", is that it reproduces the surface aspects of the genre without the verbal wit or sexual spark that lies at its core. It feels like a stylistic exercise without much human interest.
The difficulty starts with Nicholas Blincoe's impenetrable "screenplay". It's true you could go mad trying to work out the plot of Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep, but at least you are sustained by the crackling chemistry between Bogart and Bacall. Here, however, you are confronted by a strangely anonymous hitman, Terence, hired to erase a casino torch singer amorously pursued by two brothers. But I was puzzled as to why the shady casino manager should apparently have taken out a contract on his star attraction. What's more, I never really cared.
Blincoe's dialogue lacks the cut-and-thrust of classic film noir. The nearest we get to a joke is when someone says to Terence's girlfriend, a doctor: "Let me top up your salary with champagne." And even Terence's two-timing relationship - with the doctor and the chanteuse - is diminished by the fact that Daniela Nardini, playing both roles, barely distinguishes between them. The main surprise is that the coke-snorting doctor is marginally sexier.
The only real pleasure lies in watching the directors (Dan Hine and Kirsty Housley), the designer, Soutra Gilmour, and the cinematographer, Brian Tufano, re-create the penumbral quality of the movie genre. Frames are held up in front of faces to give the effect of a close-up. Nardini's voluptuous outline is glimpsed through Venetian blinds. But, although Khalid Abdalla is quietly menacing as the contract killer, you feel the whole enterprise is a strenuous stylistic imitation. In true film noir, the darkness is not an end in itself but the result of a particular vision of the proximity of lust and death.
· Until December 6. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
