What kind of play is Moliere's Don Juan? Sprightly farce? Black comedy? In Neil Bartlett's elegant farewell production, after 10 distinguished years at the Lyric, it becomes a Sartre-like morality play: Huis Clos with laughs, which, up to a point, works well.
Bartlett, who has also translated and designed, sets the action in a chic hotel: one whose crimson carpets and rococo opulence seem like an extension of Matcham's auditorium.
This not only gives the play visual unity but pays off in multiple ways. The two peasant girls whom the hero simultaneously seduces here become hotel chambermaids. Scenes are punctuated by the peremptory sound of a reception desk bell. And the eruption of the Commander's statue into Don Juan's private suite carries its own frisson.
Even if this is a decidedly dark reading, Bartlett also does justice to the play's comedy thanks to a superb performance from Paul Ritter as the servant, Sganarelle. Ritter presents us with a sly, wily figure, both appalled at his master's amorality and yet forced to connive at it: in that sense he becomes the audience's representative.
But Ritter also brings out beautifully Sganarelle's comic predicament: after Don Juan has cruelly dismissed his hectoring father, Ritter censoriously cries "it was wrong" before judiciously adding "of you to let him to talk to you like that".
My doubt concerns the interpretation of Don Juan himself. If he believes, like Marlowe's Mephistopheles, that "where we are is hell," then he is doomed from the start. And although James Wilby suggests a languid seigneurial indifference to the Don's serial seductions, he misses the character's innate rebelliousness.
Although Wilby delivers very well the hero's great defence of hypocrisy, he seems almost as stony as his ghostly dinner-guest. What he doesn't do is seduce the audience with his nihilistic charm.
Within its own terms, the production is stylishly consistent. Felicity Dean's discarded Elvira arrives as a glamorous fashion-plate and departs as a veiled penitent. Giles Havergal is suitably imposing as the hero's father. And Kirsty Bushell as a deceived chambermaid is pertly seductive. There is also a nice touch when Don Juan's female victims contemptuously kick him into the abyss. But, although Bartlett brings out the play's moral force, he rarely makes you feel there is a kind of grandeur in the hero's spiritual defiance.
· Until October 30. Box office: 08700 500 511.
