Shaggy, craggy Donald Sutherland makes a welcome appearance on the West End stage. I wish, however, he had chosen a more robust vehicle than this 90-minute two-hander by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: a whimsically aphoristic, ceaselessly teasing Parisian hit that never quite comes out of the closet in which it so deviously lurks.
At first it all looks disarmingly simple. Sutherland plays Abel Znorko, who, with a name like that, obviously has to be a reclusive Nobel prize-winner living on a remote Norwegian island. John Rubinstein is Erik Larsen, a provincial hack to whom he has reluctantly granted an interview. At first Abel is gruffly abusive, denying that his latest novel, a heavy-breathing epistolary romance, has any basis in reality. "Love," he barks, "is nothing but a perversion of pure sexuality."
What irks me is that Schmitt never quite gets to grips with the subject that clearly fascinates him: the homo-erotic nature of triangular desire in which two men love the same woman. Schmitt's play is a dance of the six-and-a-half veils that balks at ultimate disclosure and denies the gay logic of its narrative.
What we get, in Roeg Sutherland's translation, is a good deal of vivacious chat about "the existential alienation of closeness" mixed with plot-spinning reversals suggesting an upmarket version of Sleuth.
Still, Sutherland, looking with his grizzled face and white hair like a mix of Hemingway and John Huston, is highly watchable as Abel: he may not quite convince you he's a Nobel laureate but he skilfully makes the transition from posturing recluse to dedicated romantic. And John Rubinstein astutely preserves a masked reticence as the unlikely interviewer. Anthony Page, as director, tactfully referees. But if we are to see Sutherland in plays set in remote Norwegian outposts, I wish it could have been something altogether jollier, such as Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken.
Until July 29. Box office: 020-7836 8888. This review appeared in some editions yesterday. ***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
