If good history plays offer a metaphor for the present, then Oliver Ford Davies's King Cromwell eloquently passes the test. It deals with, among many other things, the conflict between hereditary and elective principles and the constitutional problems of a second chamber. While being informative and entertaining, its main fault is that it is almost too full of retrospective irony.
Ford Davies avoids narrative sprawl by compressing the action into a single day in Cromwell's life in 1657. Confined by illness and death-threats to Whitehall, Cromwell wrestles with Parliament's offer of kingship. Acceptance means that hereditary power will soon pass to his ineffectual, unsoldierly son, Richard. Endorsement of an elective system, however, implies that Colonel John Lambert will succeed and turn England into a permanent military dictatorship. Torn between these choices, Cromwell faces the failure of his dream of creating a true, god-fearing republic.
The play's virtue is that it clarifies big issues without over-simplifying them, and conveys the endless paradoxes of Cromwell's character: he's an aesthetic puritan who has music constantly by him, a radical attached to property and social order, a believer who sometimes doubts God's beneficence. But, while Ford Davies's play packs in an amazing amount of information and instructs delightfully, it is a little too ironically self-aware. Not only does Cromwell suggest that opera is an ephemeral hotch-potch and the Irish problem soluble, but even seems to foresee Tony Blair when he argues that he can't avenge the world's downtrodden without a massive increase in the military budget.
Ford Davies himself plays the title-role, under Sam Walters's guileful direction, with a moving sense of the melancholy underneath the rage. Sean Baker also does good work as the equivocating Hull poet, Andrew Marvell, and John Ashton makes a timely late appearance as the Leveller, Edward Sexby, to put the anti-Cromwellian arguments. As a play, it's not perfect, but it is streets ahead of the tushery and tat of TV historical drama.
· Until December 13. Box office: 020-8940 3633.
