The resurgence of interest in the plays of Edward Bond - whose extraordinary body of work gives him a far better claim than most to being the greatest of post-war British playwrights - is one of the more cheering recent developments in British theatre. Rupert Goold's production of Restoration for Headlong, as Oxford Stage Company now calls itself, will continue the rehabilitation begun with Sheffield's recent revival of Lear.
Like a savage 18th-century Upstairs Downstairs with added politics, Bond's 1981 play parodies traditional restoration comedy to tell a mordantly funny story of class, injustice and the way capital and privilege make alliances to protect their own interests, and the poor and exploited collude in their own oppression. As is often the case in Bond's work, politics and aesthetics work together as one in a play that rings with wild laughter, and chills you to the bone.
When the impoverished but aristocratic fop Lord Are kills his rich wife, his footman Bob is persuaded to take the blame, putting his faith in the promises of his master that he will be pardoned before he swings on the gallows. "If it weren't for his lordship, I'd kill myself," declares Bob, a man imprisoned by his own naivety. His wife, Rose, who has learned the lessons of history and her forebears' slavery, knows never to trust the privileged. When Bob protests that what happened was a mistake, she declares: "They have accidents; we make mistakes."
Both play and production are slow to catch fire. But once we get to the murder scene, it's fireworks all the way in Goold's beautifully conceived production, which understands both the play's brutal humour and its knowledge that a world without justice is a world of intolerable cruelty.
· Ends tomorrow. Box office: 0117 987 7877. Then touring.
