What does Sartre's Les Mains Sales, written in 1948, mean to us today? Richard Eyre, who has adapted and directed it as The Novice, eloquently argues that it still resonates in a world where pragmatism confronts principle. But, although his version is perfectly entertaining, I find that the play has lost much of its fire in a period where ideology is suspect and communism in retreat.
Sartre uses a thriller format to explore moral and political ideas. His setting is a fictional European country, Illythia, at the end of the last war. His hero, Hugo, is a bourgeois revolutionary who has volunteered to assassinate a proletarian party leader, Hoederer, who plans to enter a coalition with the fascists and the social democrats.
But when Hugo takes a job as Hoederer's secretary, he finds himself drawn to the man though repelled by his policies. What Sartre goes on to explore is whether a political murder, such as Hugo is obliged to commit, has any validity when it is drained of moral meaning.
The play is drenched in the atmosphere of the late 1940s: a period when communism was both a living force and a magnet to idealistic intellectuals. But Eyre's version, though it preserves Sartre's structure, drains the play of much of its political detail. We never learn that one of Hoederer's potential allies has fought with the Germans against the Soviet Union; equally we lose Hoederer's key argument that his party alone has maintained contact with the Russians throughout the war and thus holds the real power.
What we get is a greater focus on Hugo's troubled conscience and a more generalised debate on purity versus pragmatism. In the play's best scene Hugo attacks compromise while Hoederer claims that "a party is only a means to an end and there is only ever one end: power."
But while you can easily relate this to Old and New Labour, Sartre was writing about a world where something bigger was at stake: where people were prepared to kill out of conviction and where the communist party had the power to deprive murder of meaning. But even if Eyre's version lacks a precise context, it works well as an atmospheric thriller. Mark Henderson's lighting is all sinister shadows, and Richard Hartley's music generates a tingling suspense.
Jamie Glover's clean-scrubbed Hugo acutely exemplifies the innocence of an idealist lost in a world of realpolitik and Kenneth Cranham's Hoederer has the weariness of the battle-scarred politician and the humanity of the paternalistic protector. Natasha Little as Hugo's erratic, upper class wife and Emer Gillespie as a party loyalist do what they can with peripheral roles.
But, though the play has a melodramatic intensity, it now feels like a strange relic from the post-war world.
Until June 17. Box office: 020 7359 4404.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
