"More matter with less art," was Gertrude's injunction to Polonius in Hamlet. I feel much the same about this imported 70-minute South African show written by Lara Foot Newton and Lionel Newton and directed by the former. It deals with the burgeoning love between two middle-aged outsiders but seems driven more by Gerhard Marx's "visual concepts" than by any sense of social or economic reality.
The characters are called simply Man and Woman, a bad sign since it suggests everyone in general and no one in particular. In fact, we later discover that these people do have names. He, Jan, is a crippled, bookish recluse. She, Elizabeth, is a more practical figure who has devoted herself to caring for her dying mother. Drawn together by a shared solitude and fear of life, they fall redemptively in love.
Created by the same team that brought the admired Tshepang to the Gate, the show is dominated by Marx's expressionist design. Jan and Elizabeth peer through window and door-frames which they carry around as if they were giant lorgnettes. Jan, using crutches for support, walks on his knees with a pair of wooden prosthetic legs dangling from his waist. At one point, retiring for the night, he even straps a miniaturised bed around his neck.
It is ingenious but it doesn't compensate for the story's vagueness. What are we to make of the disturbing sound that traumatised Jan at the age of six and that has stayed with him ever since? Although the reverberating noise is reproduced, it has none of the potency of the breaking string in The Cherry Orchard implying imminent cataclysm. The invocation of Chekhov reminds us of the Russian's genius for creating poetry out of diurnal reality; but here we are never told what Jan and Elizabeth live off or how they relate to their country's upheavals. Their function is simply to be marooned loners clinging together for comfort.
Drama thrives on particularity; here, although there are touches of ironic comedy such as Elizabeth giving her lover a book on The Art of Rugby Tackling, there is more symbolic style than substance. Lionel Newton lends Jan the right tetchiness and Denise Newman shows a suitably exasperated affection for her bibliophile beau. What I didn't learn from their wary affair was anything much about the new South Africa.
· Until June 24. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
