Doug Wright's one-man play about a Berlin tranvestite antiquarian arrives in London festooned with New York awards. But, while Jefferson Mays's prize-winning performance deserves its plaudits, I can't help feeling that Wright's play is over-worshipful and under-investigative.
Wright has certainly found an intriguing subject: the life and times of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who was born Lothar Berfelde. Surviving both the Nazis and the communists, from 1960 the cross-dressing Charlotte turned her Berlin home into a repository of German culture. Apart from phonograph records, clocks and her lesbian aunt's gründerzeit furniture, Charlotte's museum even preserved a famous Berlin gay bar. Civically honoured, Charlotte became a national celebrity whose reputation was tarnished only by the discovery that she spent four years as a Stasi agent.
Clearly Wright's play is intended as a celebration of a sexual outsider who lived life on her own terms. But it's hard to see how how Charlotte can be said to have "survived" communism when she collaborated with the regime. And, although Mr Wright puts himself into the play and records his dismay at the discovery of Charlotte's Stasi links, he nevertheless skates lightly over their implications. Those of us who have never lived under a dictatorship are in no position to moralise. Even so, Charlotte's betrayal to the secret police of a good friend and fellow antique collector, whose possessions she inherited, merits more than a slap on the wrist.
Wright not only seems in thrall to his subject, he also never investigates the reality of her life. How difficult was it to live as a transvestite in a rigidly puritanical East Berlin? How did she finance her museum? And, although Charlotte turned her carefully preserved bar into a sexual meeting-house, was she herself devoid of emotional entanglements? By accepting Charlotte's version of herself, Wright turns her into a gay icon: what he fails to do is penetrate behind the mask.
Even the excellent Jefferson Mays cannot entirely do that. Clad in Charlotte's standard black dress and orthopaedic shoes, May hints at her steely resolve and carefully articulated speech. He also sketches in a wide variety of other characters - quite brilliantly in a TV chat-show where Charlotte's implacable dignity is contrasted with the host's vulgar applause-begging. Mays even counterpoints Charlotte's female stateliness with his impersonated author's flaky nervousness. But, although Moisés Kaufman's production and Derek McLane's design skilfully evoke Charlotte's marinated world, there's a telling line when we're told "she doesn't run a museum, she is one". If that is so, you long to know what the museum was like after closing time.
· Until February 4. Box office: 0870 060 6623.
