Sometimes the performance makes the play. For my money it is Kenneth Branagh's acting and Edward Hall's visceral production that turn this into an exciting occasion and overcome my doubts about David Mamet's elliptical theatrical nightmare.
Mamet once called this "a morality play about modern society"; and, as in all morality plays, you feel everything is predetermined. The hero is a 37-year-old businessman, Edmond Burke, who walks out on his wife and plunges into the vortex of New York's night-town.
Going in search of sex, he finds it reduced to a transaction and, having been conned and mugged, he fatally buys a survival knife. In fits of racial and sexual rage, he kills a black pimp and a would-be actress and ends up in prison where he achieves a kind of redemption.
As always, Mamet writes lacerating, heart-stopping dialogue: the encounter between Edmond and the actress is a classic example of how a mutual adrenalin-buzz leads to mayhem through a misplaced question.
But, while Mamet's technique is impeccable, there is something willed about his hero's descent into the abyss. You feel Mamet is proving a thesis about the white American male and his channelling of sexual insecurity into racial hatred. He strips his hero of choice and imposes a false inevitability on proceedings, from Edmond's initial encounter with a fortune teller to his declaration in prison that "I always knew I would end up here".
My rational doubts were swept aside by the power of Hall's production and Branagh's mesmerising performance. Branagh invests Edmond with a chunky ordinariness concealing a bottled rage. Let loose on the streets, he becomes an uncaged animal; and when he picks up the table-waiting actress there is something menacing about the way his injunction "to live" is accompanied by a raised fist.
Branagh even avoids sentimentality in the climactic prison scene where he achieves a rapport with his black cellmate and speculates about an after-life with a Hamletesque bewilderment.
Michael Pavelka's revolving set whisks through the 23 scenes and evokes a New York full of sinister crannies and towering pulpits. And, in a play that takes the form of a restless, Dante-esque kaleidoscope, there are lightning-sharp performances from Nicola Walker as a manic actress, Stephen Greif as a campy hotel clerk and burly cop and Nonso Anozie as Edmond's redemptive cellmate.
There may be something over-calculated about the plummeting downfall of Mamet's hero but this superb production confirms the observation of another Edmund Burke about night's capacity to increase our terror.
· Until November 4. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
