Gerhart Hauptmann is almost totally ignored in Britain. Yet, along with Ibsen, Zola and Becque, he was a key part of the late-19th-century Naturalist movement. And this play, written in 1893 and vigorously translated and directed by Christopher Rolls, is not only entertaining in itself but casts a long shadow.
Its heroine, Frau Wolff, is a hard-working washer-woman in the Berlin suburbs. She is also a thriving petty criminal who sells the products of her husband's poaching, pinches firewood from her employer, Herr Kruger, and is dead set on getting hold of his wife's prized fur coat. All this happens under the nose of a pompous police superintendent, Wehrhahn, who is too busy hunting down local anti-Bismarck liberals to be aware of the predatory Wolff's activities.
Brecht was a great admirer of the play, and you can see why: I'd even guess that Brecht, who was a bit of a magpie himself, incorporated Frau Wolff's mercenary survival instinct and battles on behalf of her family into the epic figure of Mother Courage. Wehrhahn, who embodies the myopia of minor officialdom and who treats the robbed Kruger as a liberal sympathiser, anticipates the bourgeois dupe in Max Frisch's The Fire Raisers who watches as a pair of arsonists stash gasoline barrels in his attic.
In short, Hauptmann's play is both lively peasant comedy and political parable, and its heroine is in the great tradition of wily theatrical servants. As played by Joanna Bacon, she is a gutsy, sleeves-rolled-up fighter and also a bit of a bully who treats her husband and two daughters as domestic slaves.
The funniest performance, however, comes from David Birrell, who plays Wehrhahn as a puffed-up smoothie who sees himself as king of the local castle and is so busy hunting for reds under the bed that he barely notices the bed itself has been stolen. Roger Braban as the apoplectic Kruger, Anthony Keetch as a corrupt journalist and David Brett as a devious bargeman lend good support. It may be true, as Eric Bentley said, that Hauptmann was "almost great". But, as Rolls's revival shows, he was a vital link between classic comedy and Brechtian drama whose rediscovery is overdue.
· Until July 15. Box office: 0870 4000 838.
