This evening of four short French farces, devised by Ed Woodall and Linda McLean, offers us stylised, modernised Feydeau. But, although it has a chic curiosity, it is based on the false premises that, in his later plays, Feydeau was edging ever closer to naturalism, while still depending on the existence of rigid bourgeois conventions.
Both assumptions are blown out of the window here. For a start, the eight actors, who look as if they might have stepped out of a Vogue fashion-plate, mimetically epitomise marital chaos as if they are taking part in an exercise at the school of Jacques Lecoq: so much for Feydeau's Strindbergian naturalism. Modern dress also looks anachronistic in a world where respectability is a prime virtue and cuckoldry a social stigma.
The piece that works best is one where a mother, about to give birth prematurely, goes rattily berserk and insists that her husband prances around with a piss-pot on his head; but this is largely because Leah Fletcher captures exactly the heroine's dizzying irrationality. However, Feydeau's Don't Walk Around With Nothing On misfires precisely because the style is inappropriate. The idea of a heroine padding around her apartment in her undies - vaguely shocking in 1911 - carries little weight today. Even the hilarious final image - of her having a wasp-bite sucked from her bum by a passing Figaro journalist - loses some of its frisson in a production where everything is stylised from the start.
It's an evening that provokes the occasional wry smile rather than outright belly laughs; and in a piece like We're Giving Baby a Laxative, the absurdity of the situation, where Duncan Wisbey as a potty-maker's client finds himself suffering premature evacuation, overcomes the stylised production. But my advice to director Ed Woodall would be Don't Mess With Feydeau: he knew what he was doing.
· Until April 24. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
