Was Samuel Beckett familiar with Maurice Maeterlinck's drama when he wrote his play in which nothing happens - twice? Almost certainly, because the similarities are startling between Waiting for Godot and this 1890 drama about a group of blind people stranded in the middle of nowhere awaiting a priest who never comes.
Beckett's play takes the prize, but Maeterlinck's has its own austere intensity. In Jack McNamara's production the symbolism of crying babies, a mad woman weeping and a god who is dead never seems overwrought. Written towards the end of an old century, this play is strikingly pertinent to our own, where the feeling of having lost our way is a nag in the brain. It is not what is said but what is unsaid that is most eloquent here, the great chunks of silence crumbling away like the heavy block of masonry upon which the blind perch uneasily in Vali Mahlouji's simple and effective design.
The play is allowed to speak for itself. The production may lack the soundscape it demands and is at times uncomfortably static, but it is performed with directness by a cast of six blind and visually impaired actors. I am not certain this literal casting pays many dividends, because, surely, Maeterlinck's intention in creating his unseeing protagonists was to point up the blindness of the audience. It is we who are stumbling around in the dark.
Perhaps not quite essential, this show is nevertheless an intriguing curiosity.
· Until March 1. Box office: 020-7503 1646.
