The suit in question is not one of the piano player's sequin-spangled creations, but a court case that the American entertainer brought against the Daily Mirror in 1959 after one of its columnists, William Connor, described him as a "winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love". The implication was that Liberace was gay at a time when homosexuality was still illegal, and at stake was not only his reputation, but also his million-dollar-a-year income, generated from his adoring fans - mostly women - who would regularly propose marriage. TK Light's courtroom drama, directed by the ever reliable Phil Willmott, has, as courtroom settings tend to, an innate sense of theatre, but it misses a trick by failing to open the scenario out beyond the witness box. It never gets behind Liberace's slippery sequin smile and leering public persona, and is most interesting in its confirmation of late-1950s Britain as a place of rigid class and social hierarchies, mindsets and very flaccid sex lives.
Connor, a man who spent the war in North Africa, claims, with a straight face, "that nothing I saw in the theatre of war prepared me for the theatre of Liberace". After a while you suspect everyone is lying through their teeth. None-the-less this is no Oscar Wilde trial, and in failing to dig deep enough into the story and the contradictions of its central player, Light's play offers light entertainment and nothing more. Bobby Crush, an Opportunity Knocks winner who apparently modelled his act on Liberace, is horribly good as the showman who treats the witness box as his personal stage with the jury as an adoring audience.
· Until June 19. Box office: 020-7287 2875.
