It often seems that Ben Jonson's plays are more appreciated by scholars than by 21st-century theatregoers. Alas, this production is unlikely to change matters.
TS Eliot argued that to fully appreciate Jonson's genius we must see him "unbiased by time, as a contemporary". To do this, he said, "does not so much require the power of putting ourselves into 17th-century London as it requires the power of setting Jonson in our London".
That is exactly what Joss Bennathan does with Jonson's comedy The Alchemist, in which a trio of chancers try to fleece the greedy and ambitious who want to benefit from boom time.
Bennathan sets his production in the glossy, get-rich-quick 1980s, at a point somewhere between the Pet Shop Boys guilelessly singing "Let's make lots of money" and the Wall Street crash.
The concept fits the play like a glove - but without actors who have the experience to make Jonson's language crackle and sing, it is not sufficient to make the comedy spark into exuberant life.
Bennathan's company, PresentMoment, was set up to create imaginative stagings of well-known and neglected texts. It has already proved that it can take the dull out of the classics with a lively catwalk production of The Country Wife.
But this is a much tougher nut to crack, largely because Johnson's go-getting, hard-sell, energetic language is as difficult on the stage as it is on the page.
Imagine how David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross might sound to a theatregoer four centuries hence and you get an idea of the scale of the problem. It is not that it can't be done, just that it is extremely hard to do.
The production's failure is indicated by the scarcity of laughs, and the fact that the few chuckles there are come almost entirely from "business" rather than from the text.
I saw the production at a final preview, and undoubtedly some of the performances will grow in confidence, but this evening has a long way to go before it is a good night out.
· Until February 2. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
