The winner of the 2004 Pulitzer prize and Tony award for best play is an unusual piece of dramatic writing. The one-man play is as much about Doug Wright's process of writing it as it is a celebration of its subject, the Berlin transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. The extraordinary actor Jefferson Mays, who has performed the show since it opened off-Broadway in 2003, primarily embodies Von Mahlsdorf herself, telling her story to the rapt Wright in the 1990s, but he also speaks the words of Wright's letters as the writer forges a friendship with his subject, and struggles with the challenges of constructing the theatrical project we are now watching.
This mediation works to Wright's advantage in constructing an entertaining and accessible 100-minute historical docudrama that holds up Von Mahlsdorf as an archetypal late-20th century figure of ambiguous heroism. But the play's meta-dramatic quality also drains the material of its politics and tells the audience what to think. Our relationship to Charlotte's life is skilfully mediated by Wright's response to it: at first, she is a curiosity, an antiques collector whose most interesting artefact is herself. Then we are told she is an individualist icon: a homosexual who found a way to support her and other gay lifestyles throughout the repression of both the Nazis and the communist regime.
Then we discover she may have been a Stasi-informing traitor. This is the closest the play comes to dramatic conflict, but we again experience it at a remove - as Wright's dilemma in knowing what to think about his perhaps-fallen heroine. The writer's narcissism aside, the production is more than worth seeing for Mays's magnificent performance under Moisés Kaufman's taut direction, and for the window it opens on a uniquely iconoclastic real-life figure.
· Until October 12. Box office: 00 353 1 677 8899.
