"Have you seen the play? No, but I've read the title." So ran an old joke about Peter Weiss's conveniently shortened Marat-Sade. The same gag could be applied to Stephen Sewell's play. Its title refers to a book written by its hero, an Australian academic at an Ivy League university. The hero, needless to say, can't get his book published. Happily, Sewell's play, feted in its native Australia, has made it here, where it galvanised its first-night audience.
The play has such energy, vitality, anger and topicality that I feel a heel to pick holes, but pick I must. Would a political scientist like Talbot Finch, with his Pilgerish views, even get in the door of a modern American university? Were he seriously seeking tenure, would he tell his potential employers over cocktails that America is sustained by "the myth of its own righteousness"? Would he barely have heard of, let alone read, The Trial, which his own life comes to resemble? And is American academic life so universally corrupt that even the college dean is caught watching child porn on the website?
But, even if it is filled with improbabilities, Sewell's play is both fictionally gripping and politically stimulating. With its echoes of Kafka, Oleanna and Pakula's The Parallax View, it shows Talbot being falsely accused of harassment, persecuted by an anonymous, pistol-packing heavy and professionally destroyed. What Sewell is clearly saying is that America is now a country in which the Socratic quest for truth is subordinate to iron certainty. And, although he underplays the surviving itch of dissent, he is right to point to "certain cultural similarities" between 1930s Germany and contemporary America.
Because it's such a heated play, I feel Sam Walters' production could afford to be cooler. Physically, it's very well staged, in its equation of Talbot's academic office with a prison cell, but it too often becomes a shouting match. However, Jonathan Guy Lewis as the beleaguered hero, Amanda Royle as his screenwriter wife and Julia Sandiford as a Chomsky-esque student are all first rate and, like it or not, the play sends you out into the night passionately arguing.
· Until December 11. Box office: 020-8940 3633.
