Maria should be celebrating her graduation but is raging at the loss of the boyfriend she had expected to marry. Beautiful, rich, clever Desiree is obsessed by sex and death, and her former lover Freder is drinking himself into an early grave while enjoying little Lucy, who is ripe for corruption. Irena is reinventing herself and will allow nothing to stand in her way, and Alt, the former doctor disgraced for ending the suffering of a fatally ill child, does nothing as he watches this little group self-destruct.
For much of its duration, Ferdinand Bruckner's 80-year-old play about a bunch of Austrian medical students suffering from terminal ennui seems startlingly modern. That is very much due to Simon Day's incisive translation and a production by Katie Read that is exquisitely acted. These beautiful losers, shining so brightly but so full of despair, could just as easily be today's twentysomethings searching for meaning in their lives. Love, drink or drugs cannot fill the void. Hindsight, however, gives Bruckner's drama an added twist: you can see how National Socialism came to fill the deep black hole at the centre of these people's lives.
That said, it doesn't entirely work dramatically, and the play falters as it reaches its climactic final moments. After two hours in their company, the attractions of these people begins to pall severely. They seem like a group of overprivileged whiners whose self-obsessions are pathetically adolescent. You start thinking that what they really need to do is settle down to a good day's work instead of wafting around in their pyjamas, exuding pretty despair. There is also a moral ambiguity at the heart of the piece that makes it interesting but slightly sickening. Like Desiree, the play itself seems a little in love with death.
But it is very, very nicely done, with not a dud performance and one or two outstanding ones. Miranda Raison makes Desiree's death wish seem tragic rather than merely silly, Elaine Heathfield gets the complexity of the not-so-sensible Maria, and Alan Cox is superb as the all-observing Alt who once took a stand but now merely stands by.
· Until August 17. Box office: 020-7223 2223.
