Mariana Pineda is a woman who is living dangerously. A beautiful young widow with two small children, she has given her heart to Don Pedro, one of the conspirators in the anti-monarchist cause, and spends her days secretly stitching a liberal flag that will be raised when the revolution starts in Granada. Her whitewashed house is a place of secrets, and in Naomi Dawson's simple and effective design its many small windows are less a means of looking out on the world than a way for Mariana's enemies - especially the sinister government official Pedrosa - to spy on her.
Written in 1925 during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera that preceded the Franco regime, Federico Garcia Lorca's homage to the popular heroine who was garrotted almost a century earlier was a clear dramatic gauntlet thrown down against the rising tide of fascism and oppression. Eleven years later Lorca, too, would die a lonely death at the hands of fascist paramilitaries.
Mariana is an interestingly ambiguous figure. She is swept up in the liberal cause only because of her love for Don Pedro. Her passion is born more of romance than revolutionary zeal. Yet when Don Pedro and his fellow conspirators choose to save their own necks and sacrifice hers, she steadfastly refuses to name names. Abandoned, she stares death straight in the eye, a transcendent figure who understands that love and liberty go together and that if you are not free you cannot freely give your heart. In dying for love she takes a revolutionary stand.
Kate Wild's production is initially a little clumsy, but then so is the drama: this was only Lorca's second play, and it is written in high-cholesterol mode, all rich buttery poetry. Some might find the style indigestible, but Wild cannily holds back in every other department so that the gusty language is in contrast to the spare staging. The acting is finely balanced, too, with particularly good performances from Kate Fleetwood as the feverish, doomed heroine, and John Kirk as Pedrosa, who hunts down Mariana like a sadistically randy cat after a mouse.
· Until October 12. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
