There is something faintly perverse about staging Rainer Werner Fassbinder's study of obsessive love in a chilly, brick-walled cavern.
Even though the audience is supplied with blankets and Yvonne McDevitt's production has its merits, Fassbinder's play, with its echoes of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, cries out for a voluptuous intimacy.
The work itself minutely charts the doomed passion of Petra, a divorced, highly acclaimed fashion designer, for an indolent, predatory beauty, Karen, who sweeps into her life.
The play not only shows that love may be extravagantly bestowed on someone incapable of returning it. It also suggests that everyone is ensnared in its turmoils: Karen's exploitative indifference to Petra is matched by the heroine's own signal blindness to the unrequited devotion of her silent servant, Marlene.
Arguably the sanest words in this account of interlocking unhappiness come from Petra's mother who declares: "We're all very fragile in the face of our terror."
McDevitt stages the play in a long, rectangular room with the actors manipulating the arc-lamps and sound-effects visibly produced.
But, while this creates striking images, it somewhat dissipates the play's claustrophobic power. The best feature of the evening is the acting. Sasha Behar excellently conveys Petra's mix of success-worship and poleaxed helplessness in face of misdirected passion. Anna Egseth as the mute Marlene also dogs her footsteps with a sinister fidelity and Deirdra Morris as Petra's befurred mother, singing a Dietrich song as she enters, exudes the silvery wisdom of experience.
McDevitt's production is full of neat, ironic touches such as the intrusion of a doll that is an exact simulacrum of Petra's lost lover; but I would, literally, warm to the play more if it were mounted, as at New End in 1976, in a more seductively inviting space.
· Until January 5. Box office: 08700 601 761
