Women are having a pretty tough time in the Arcola's Last Waltz season, which comprises three rarely performed German or Austrian plays dating from the beginning of the 20th century. In Wedekind's Musik a young music student is destroyed by the abuse of her singing teacher and the hypocrisy of society. Gerhart Hauptmann's Rose Bernd tells a similar story, although in this instance the action takes place in a rural peasant community in Silesia.
In her small, conservative village, Rose Bernd is a man magnet. We first see her emerging from the bushes, a strong, lusty, good-natured young woman, followed by Flamm, a local dignitary with a crippled wife. Rose and Flamm suit each other, but soon the smile is wiped from Rose's face. Her father insists on her marriage to August, a pious, pasty young man who has turned pessimism into an art form, and as a result Rose becomes the blackmail victim of the twisted local engineer Streckmann. When her respectability is called into question, Rose follows a desperate course that results in her own destruction.
It is fascinating that two early 20th-century male writers should so clearly chart how the constraints placed on women suffocate them, but the production team behind Hauptmann's drama never quite persuade that that this is a masterpiece rather than just a curiosity.
Gari Jones' production fails to give a real sense of time and place, and although Dennis Kelly's translation is muscular and full of memorable lines ("He has lied the blue out of the sky") and neat turns of phrase, the characters remain remote and lack a psychological fleshiness. Some of the performances are over-emphatic, others are very good, particularly Caroline Hayes whose fresh-faced Rose looses her illusions under the weeping willow.
· Until May 7. Box office: 020-7503 1646.
