Told By An Idiot are a physical ensemble with their own fanatical following. But, after the disappointment of their recent excursion into scripted drama with Playing The Victim, they are back on form with this beguiling mix of jazz, mime and speech investigating the life and death of the French cultural icon, Boris Vian.
Vian was an archetypal Left Bank Bohemian who combined the roles of dramatist, novelist, jazz-trumpeter and wit: I have a mental picture of a Parisian George Melly. But the most extraordinary fact about Vian's life was the manner of his leaving it: he died, at 39, while watching a cinematic botchup of one of his novels, I Spit On Your Graves. Seizing avidly on this, Paul Hunter, who has conceived and directed the show, intercuts Vian's fractured memories of his packed life with an imaginative recreation of the grisly movie that propelled his death.
Jazz was clearly vital to Vian's life in that his heroes were Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie; and just as they improvised round a composer's specified chords, so Hunter uses comic riffs to highlight key themes. The central one is Vian's fascinated envy of a distant culture. In one inspired scene he is shaved by the woman who becomes his lover; and when she points out "You're not black" he cryptically replies "I could be". And even in the scenes from Vian's messedup revenge-movie you are reminded that he was a translator of the hard-boiled American school of Chandler and James M. Cain.
Periodically the show descends descends into whimsy but it is always rescued by the skilled playing of Zoe Rahman on piano and Mark Crown on trumpet and by the sheer physical exuberance of Stephen Harper and Hayley Carmichael. At one point, as lovers, they lie horizontally on the floor and perform a writhing, erotic jitterbug: at another she enthusiastically bashes a tennis-ball suspended on the end of a fishing-rod. You may not learn that much about Vian but when Carmichael's tiny frame shakes in response to music you gasp the vital connection between jazz and comic improvisation.
· Until February 22. Box office: 020-7223 2223.
