There is the great Gambon around the corner at the Albery and the luminous Judi Dench down the road at the Gielgud, but if you want to see great acting you need to head for the Arts Theatre, where unknown Richard Dormer is reprising his Edinburgh hit show about the rise and fall of Northern Irish snooker legend, Alex "Hurricane" Higgins. This is one for the boys and those who like their sporting heroes well-tarnished and with fully developed drink and woman problems.
The 70-minute trajectory is not an arc but a series of violent ups and downs as Higgins finds fame and fortune, loses it to the drink, makes a triumphant comeback and then gets throat cancer. You have to give it to him, the man is a fighter, although as Gary McCann's boxing ring design makes clear it is mostly himself that he has spent his life fighting.
There is nothing heroic in such a perverse waste of talent, but Dormer's one-man show almost persuades you otherwise. It rollicks along to a soundtrack that takes you through the late 1960s and 1970s including the arrival of British troops in Northern Ireland and the three-day week. Rachel O'Riordan's staging has a swaggering, sweaty physicality as Dormer throws himself around a stage increasingly littered with £20 notes, beer cans, empty cigarette packets, broken dreams and the spectre of abandoned children. The great thing about this performance is that it is never an impersonation and it always finds the tragic in the deeply flawed through the toughest and least sentimental route possible.
I'd like to have known more, particularly about Higgins' wife, and although his chippy belligerence clearly caused problems, it is hard to buy the thesis that it was the anti-working class establishment that ended Higgins' career. There was only one person who killed Higgins' career. And that was Higgins himself.
· Until May 8. Box office: 020-7836 3334.
