How do you do Lorca in English? My spirits scarcely soared when a group of Joan Hunter Dunns came on to do a supposedly sensual Spanish dance. But after a false start, Auriol Smith's production settles down to give a true and moving account of this little-known 1935 play about lost love and passing time.
Eleven years before writing the play, Lorca discovered a poem on the "rosa mutabilis", which opens blood-red in the morning and by nightfall is shedding its petals. That is precisely the fate of Lorca's orphaned Granada heroine who, in the years spanning 1885 to 1910, moves from optimistic lover to solitary spinster as she realises the cousin to whom she was engaged will never return from South America. Even if today we might question Doña Rosita's lack of get-up-and-go, Lorca gives a faithful account of Spain's rigid social conventions and of Granada's descent from centre of civilisation to backwater.
Smith's production, however, is infinitely more at ease with Lorca's realism than his symbolism. You hear more than a whisper of Chekhov in the painfully accurate scene where Sheila Reid and Tim Hardy, excellent as the heroine's aunt and uncle, dwell on the slow decline of marital rage and passion into grudging silence. And there is an outstanding performance from Anna Carteret who turns their busybody of a housekeeper into a woman full of practical wisdom: when she rubs the base of her spine, you believe in her lifetime spent scrubbing floors.
Paula Stockbridge has a harder task as the supine heroine, though she captures exactly her descent from scarlet-gowned hope to stoical solitude. And there is vivid support from Ian Angus Wilkie as a marmalade-haired teacher and from Caroline John as a matriarch who announces: "I'm not short of taste - it's money I lack." Less lavish than Phyllida Lloyd's 1997 Almeida production, this version makes a persuasive case for Lorca's play. But it also confirms that it is his domestic truth, rather than his florid symbolism, that survives best in translation.
· Until April 24. Box office: 020-8940 3633.
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