The Oxford Stage Company has built up an enviable reputation for retrieving neglected plays. And you could hardly have a better candidate than Peter Flannery's Singer, written during the twilight years of Thatcherism, which is about the need for historical memory in an age of collective amnesia.
Flannery's eponymous hero is loosely based on the 50s slum landlord, Peter Rachman; and we watch with astonishment as he reinvents himself against the the shifting landscape of post-war Britain. Having survived Auschwitz, he becomes a thriving racketeer. But, after suffering apparent death in a Hampstead pond, Flannery's Singer is miraculously resurrected. For 20 years he becomes a soup-kitchen saint tending the homeless but is then appropriated by Thatcherite businessmen who want to use his talents to build tower blocks for the dispossessed.
Inevitably, Flannery's play has a strip-cartoon quality and lacks the cultural detail you find in his more expansive TV work such as Our Friends in the North. But what binds the helter-skelter scenes together is Flannery's preoccupation with forgetting and remembrance. While Singer endlessly metamorphoses, his fellow Auschwitz survivor, Stefan, obsessively reconstructs the death camps through painting; and if Singer has learned anything by the end it is that individuals, like societies, need to acknowledge the horrendous past.
But, to his credit, Flannery suggests that we can also be devoured by our memories. And the point painfully emerges in the most searing scene in Sean Holmes's fine production.
Having struck up a loving relationship with the daughter of his former Ukrainian guard at Auschwitz, Singer uses her as a decoy to trap her surviving father. As he confronts, the old man with his sins, we realise that the past can become a prison for the victim as well as the guilty. Ron Cook, otherwise an irrepressibly jaunty Singer who dons a series of highly theatrical masks, lends this scene real emotional weight.
He is perfectly supported by John Light as the darkly haunted Stefan, Hattie Morahan as his deceived lover, and Paul Rider as her age-stricken father. If I single out this scene, it is because it lifts Flannery's play into another dimension. For much of its length it entertains us with satirical barbs against a corrupt establishment. But at this moment it becomes real art by showing us that historical remembrance can be a double-edged sword.
· Until April 10. Box office: 020-7328 1000.
