Audiences are not usually admitted to the rehearsal room for the same reason that restaurant patrons do not usually sit in the kitchen. The preparation of art, like food, can be a laborious business. It's better to bring it out when it's ready.
Jonathan Lichtenstein has written a play about play-making: a group of actors gather in a rehearsal studio to run scenes from a drama about political division. A young man arrives in East Berlin shortly after the collapse of the Wall to confront his grandmother about her experiences during the war. At the same time, in present-day Palestine, an Israeli soldier forces an Arab to abandon his home. And there's a third stream, addressing the plight of Jewish fugitives in Nazi Germany.
There's a lot of thematic material to cover, and the rehearsal-room format is a convenient means to encompass it. Yet Lichtenstein manipulates the conceit as a means of skipping through to the most dramatic scenes while avoiding the more difficult elements of plot and character development.
Whatever emotional import the work accrues is afflicted by the bathos of watching actors at work. Scenes of intense thematic import dissolve into prattle about parking meters and whose turn it is to make the tea. More problematic still is the figure of the director, who makes the odd, taciturn comment, but mostly sits upstage, underscoring the action with melancholic passages of Bach. Is he supposed to be running the show? Or is he just the rehearsal pianist?
Terry Hands' production is a detailed insight into the creative process. Yet it seems strangely counterproductive to lavish so much attention into making something appear half-finished.
· Until November 25. Box office: 0845 330 3565.
