Yasmina Reza achieved global fame as the author of Art. This 70-minute stage version of her autobiographical first novel, however, is everything we mean by artsy: filled with wistful musings on time, music and death. It might make a passable Gallic Book at Bedtime but it lacks theatrical dynamic. Susie Lindeman, its sole performer, is discovered curled up on a chaise-longue in a black mini-dress. Slender of thigh and elfin of feature, she proceeds to conjure up a world in which haute couture is seamlessly entwined with high culture. Even on a visit to her dying literary agent, the heroine informs us she wore "a little blue linen dress, trimmed with white piping". And on a trip to hear Pollini play Beethoven, she can't resist revealing that she sported a blue satin trouser-suit enhanced by thin grey stripes.
The heart of the piece lies in the heroine's evocation of her ailing father, but even here you are aware less of the dying old man than of the daughter's self-absorption. And, in the recollection of the father's clumsy attempt to play the adagio from Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata, our sympathy for him is short-circuited by the daughter's memory of her own laughter. Irony occasionally intrudes, as when the heroine rebukes a concert-companion, whose life is cracking up, for his egotism.
But for the most part these vignettes of Parisian life are suffused with a mixture of cultural name-dropping and solipsistic self-regard. And, although Lindeman is a beguiling and accomplished performer with an odd resemblance to Sylvia Plath, she cannot overcome Reza's emotional narcissism. There's a revealing moment when the heroine, returning from London by Eurostar, looks at the brick houses beside the tracks. "Who lives in them?" she muses. "Who wakes each morning to look upon this low horizon of bricks, chimneys and bewildering walls?" A little more curiosity about the inhabitants, and a little less preoccupation with self, might make Reza a better novelist and this a more compelling piece of theatre. Until September 27. Box office: 020-7287 2875.
