Substance matters more than style. And the important thing about Jon Fosse's Nightsongs is not, as advance reports suggested, the use of minimal sets and live-operated lighting, but the play's disquieting truth. The Norwegian Fosse emerges, in Gregory Motton's translation, as blood brother to the early Edward Bond or the German Franz Xaver Kroetz, whose plays enjoyed a huge vogue in the 1970s.
Fosse's theme is the tragic banality of daily life. To that end he presents us with a young couple clearly at breaking point. The man is a struggling, agoraphobic writer; he is supported by his partner, who is on maternity leave and craving adult human contact. The crisis erupts when the woman goes out for the evening, returns suspiciously late and, after a series of lies and evasions, reveals that she is about to leave for good with her lover.
The story, however, is not really the point. What makes the play compelling is the deadly accuracy with which Fosse captures his characters' verbal and emotional inarticulacy. Sentences trail off in mid-air. The grandparents don't know what to say about the baby. And the heroine, at the point of departure, is helplessly torn between conflicting impulses.
I was slightly irked by Fosse's lack of social specificity. But the play has the smell of life. Played on a sparsely furnished traverse stage, Katie Mitchell's production also forces us into a strange complicity, so that we become eavesdroppers rather than spectators.
And, with nowhere to hide, the actors have no choice but to be totally truthful. Sophie Okonedo precisely captures the young woman's dithering as she comes to a crossroads offering two equally snake-infested routes. Paul Higgins as the young man marvellously hides his fear of abandonment under nervous smiles and tic-like tugs at his clothes. And Jonathan Cullen as the lover catches the embarrassment of absconding in the early hours, with partner and baby, crying: "There must be another way of doing this."
The production's supposed innovations matter far less than Fosse's painfully honest sense of the yawning gulf between feeling and expression.
· Until March 23. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
