I've always thought Athol Fugard a magnificent writer when working with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, but a heavily symbolic one in his solo work. And, while this 1965 two-hander is not without historical interest, it suffers from Fugard's desire to invest every moment with overwrought significance.
Set in a shabby room in Port Elizabeth, it deals with a fretful brother-sister reunion. Johnny is a closeted dreamer who has sacrificed his life to looking after his ailing father badly injured in a railway explosion. Hester, driven from home by the old man, returns as a Johannesburg prostitute desperate to claim the accident compensation that she regards as her rightful inheritance. Old wounds and old packing-cases are traumatically opened as the distraught siblings reveal the inescapable burden of their shared past.
Clearly the unseen father - who Fugard describes in his notebooks as a figure of "hate, bigotry, resentment, meanness" - represents the unacceptable face of authoritarian South Africa, and his children its damaged products. But, where Beckett and Albee in Waiting for Godot and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf give their unseen figures a fictive plausibility, Fugard's ailing patriarch seems a dramatic device designed to keep the action afloat. You wonder why it takes Hester over two hours to invade the old man's room, and how she and her brother are allowed to make enough racket to wake the dead. When Fugard finally supplies the answer, it feels like one more symbolic contrivance.
What saves the play is Fugard's poetic evocation of Port Elizabeth: lines like "the Indian women ironing white shirts" create an instantly memorable picture. Fugard has also written two rich roles for actors. Originally played in London by Ben Kingsley and Janet Suzman, they are now taken, in Paul Robinson's production, by Zubin Varla and Tracy-Ann Oberman. The former's fierce, solitary intensity is well matched by the latter's exhausted sensuality. The actors are excellent but the play itself, like the characters, seems overburdened by the weight of the past.
· Until November 1. Box office: 020-7620 3494.
