You have to admire the pluck: Myriad Productions are giving us a rare sighting of one of the 50 plays by the Indian poet, philosopher and Nobel prize-winner, Rabindranath Tagore. But, although it is something of a collector's item, there is a yawning gulf between the metaphorical lyricism of Ananda Lal's translation and the localised politics of Kevin Rowntree's production.
Written in 1924, Tagore's play clearly invokes the spirit of India's great epic poems. It tells the story of a fabled beauty, Nandini, who is drawn to an oppressed mining community where she hopes to meet her lover. But, once in the town, she finds herself siding with the victimised Nibelung-like workers against the autocratic local king entrapped in his world of gold and iron. Eventually she foments a revolution in which all the leading players - herself, the king and her long-lost lover - seem to find salvation through death.
As it stands, it is a curious hybrid with echoes of the Ramayana, Wagner's Ring cycle and 1920s Expressionism. But, in its allusiveness, it cries out for the kind of magic simplicity Peter Brook brought to a show like Conference of the Birds. Instead, Rowntree stages it against a barbed-wire industrial compound, intended to invoke the Bhopal disaster of 1984 in which poisonous gas fatally leaked from a chemical plant. I see the point; but Rowntree's decision both limits the stage space and sits oddly with Lal's flowery translation, full of lines like, "You are a messenger from the inaccessible coast of my ocean".
Radically cut and played on a bare stage, the piece would be infinitely more viable. But Rowntree certainly gets vigorous performances from his mixed-race, six-strong cast. Shani Perez embodies Nandini's physical beauty and lyrical ardour, and there is strong support from Sally Okafor in a variety of roles including the power-encased king, and Sadao Ueda as one of his whipped victims. And, at the very least, the play makes you want to explore Tagore: a highly practical theatre-maker who was both actor, director and playwright, and who combined a hunger for myth with an irrepressible social conscience.
· Until July 23. Box office: 08700 600 100
