Natalie Abrahami, winner of this year's James Menzies-Kitchen award, has already proved herself a director of exceptional flair. Her production of Human Rites at Southwark was a triumph of style over substance. She sets herself a far harder task here with a staging of a double bill of Samuel Beckett's Play and Not I, so seamlessly linked that they appear like one single play, not two separate ones written a decade apart. One wonders what the Beckett estate will make of that.
Too a large extent, the idea works well. Studio One at BAC has had the seats ripped out so it looks more like a gallery than a theatre, and it creates a minimalist setting for this journey, from the piercing searchlight interrogation of the three heads in urns in Play, to the lone illuminated jabbering mouth of Not I that is silenced only by the terrible darkness.
But for all their similarities, the plays are very different. Waiting for Godot was famously described as "a play in which nothing happens, twice" and the description is even more apt for Play which has a second half that is a perfect replica of the first. Just as well, really, for such is the dizzying speed of the delivery first time round that it is hard to take in the fragmentary words pouring from each of the three heads.
In Play, the three protagonists seem doomed to repeat themselves and their banalities for infinity, forever under interrogation by an almighty searchlight. In Not I it is obliteration that beckons, the final putting out of the light. Billie Whitelaw described performing it as "falling backwards into hell, emitting cries". Watching it is like falling backwards into hell, hearing cries.
· Until August 7. Box office: 020-7223 2223.
