In solving one problem, you often create others. And in her anxiety to avoid giving us linear, filleted Flaubert, Fay Weldon's Shared Experience adaptation of his great novel turns it into confessional melodrama. It makes a perverse evening redeemed by Amanda Drew's stellar Emma.
Weldon radically restructures the whole story. Her version takes place over breakfast on the last day of the heroine's life. Driven mad by her mounting debts and her commonplace marriage to her country-bumpkin husband, Emma reveals to him her past adulteries and threatens suicide. Seeking absolution, she is met only by Charles's numbed disgust. And, having relived her whole life in a morning, Emma opts for a death by poisoning, which he seems powerless to prevent.
Clearly Weldon's intention is to make a feminist case for Emma: to suggest that like Ibsen's Hedda, she is the victim of a stifling bourgeois society that offers no scope for her energies. But this involves a considerable distortion of Flaubert's novel. His heroine may be a victim but she is doomed by her poor education, her romantic, book-fuelled dreams (omitted here) and by the fact that, as George Saintsbury said, "she has a taste for men, but none in them."
The other key problem is one of style. Everything that in Flaubert is subtle and suggestive is here banged across. Even one of the greatest erotic passages in all literature, where Emma and Leon make love in the back of a cab, becomes a piece of noisily choreographed coupling. And, seeing a family ball being evoked through a fluttering tablecloth, I momentarily felt the show could have been rechristened Arsenic and Old Lace.
Reductive though it is, it is staged with admirable dexterity by Polly Teale. And the vividly expressive Drew gives a dazzling performance that captures Emma's caged frustration, sexual magnetism and unfulfilled religious longing. She is strongly supported by Adrian Schiller as her shattered husband, Simon Thorp as her casually treacherous lovers and Maxwell Hutcheon as the draper who occasions her ruin. The execution is fine. But, by artificially compressing events, Weldon sacrifices the corrosive effect of time, which is the ultimate theme of all great fiction.
· Until November 22. Box office: 08700 500511
