It may be a new year but there is nothing new about Milan Kundera's shaggy 18th-century seduction story of love, revenge, deception and friendship. As they travel through France, Jacques (a servant) is always just about to tell his master (a not so bright young man whose fetish for women with big bottoms has led him to be rather unlucky in affairs of the heart) the complicated story of his own love life. But other stories keep getting in the way. Every time Jacques begins his tale, other stories snake into the narrative, running in parallel and then taking precedence.
It seems that only death can stop these endless narratives, but that, of course, is another story.
Kundera's piece, deftly translated by Simon Callow, is as much about the nature of storytelling and the art of the writer as it is about the narrative. Its self-awareness - there is a mediocre poet and much reference to the characters' knowledge that they are being controlled by an outside force - makes for a certain playfulness on the conventions of theatre itself. But Kundera's cleverness soon slips into facetiousness, and facetiousness quickly gets in the way of the storytelling itself, as Kundera forgets that the writer is only as good as his last story.
Much of the evening - particularly the tale of Madame de la Pomerey's attempts to revenge herself on her former lover - owes a debt to Marivaux and Laclos, but lacks the wit and the surgeon-like ability of those writers to dispassionately dissect the human heart. Ellan Parry's elegant line drawings offer a simple, clean and stylish setting, but the production is ragged and clumsy, lacking both elegance and comic charm, and the performances are at best so-so, and in some cases a complete no-no.
· Until January 23. Box office: 020-7793 9193.
