Ferdinand Bruckner's 1928 play emerged from a Vienna that produced Freud and would embrace Hitler, and both are evident in his story of medical students self-destructing on post-first world war disillusionment. The Nietzsche-influenced Freder is the brutalising vampire who feeds upon them all: transforming the maid into a thief and painted whore, seducing graduating student Marie, and supplying Desiree - who believes that life is only disappointment after the age of 17 - with the means to fulfil her death wish. Despite a two-decade old translation, this 80-year-old play often seems arrestingly modern - as if it had been penned with the "emo generation" in mind.
But watching people indulging in hedonistic excess and discovering it is not as fun as it is cracked up to be is not entirely enjoyable. Gadi Roll's distinctive production transposes the action from the student rooms of Vienna to a modern neverwhere, an impersonal, container-like space. Bruckner's play conjures a hothouse world, but Roll turns it into the epitome of European cool with an aesthetic that denies the audience emotional investment in the proceedings. He also encourages the young cast to deliver the dialogue as if they had machine guns for mouths: the speediness combined with a lack of diction make great swathes of the dialogue incomprehensible.
In the circumstances, few shine, and Jack Sandle's Freder doesn't come close to being the fascinating figure around whom the fragile moths flutter. There is an interesting twist at the end, which suggests there is a fate worse than death, a life of stultifying bourgeois boredom. Roll's striking production does not serve the play well, but it is an intriguing calling card from the Belgrade's new associate director, and I am already looking forward to what he does next.
· Until October 20. Box office: 0247 655 3055.
