Not since the Macbeths held their disastrous dinner party has a couple failed quite so spectacularly to maintain the facade of social niceties in a tricky situation as the Old Woman and Old Man in Eugène Ionesco's 1953 "tragic farce". There is a foretaste of Beckett's Waiting for Godot tramps in this elderly couple, who live in a tower surrounded by water and play games and share memories to kill time. Time, of course, is killing them and so is the regret at not having led lives of meaning and worth.
"You could have been a master of the hounds," says the Old Woman tetchily to her janitor husband, who has never been master of anything but the mop and bucket. So the Old Man decides to hold a party at which "the Orator" will deliver his message to humanity. We assume that nobody will turn up, as in Godot, but soon the doorbell chimes, the guests arrive and chairs are called for. Before long, the hosts are falling over themselves - and the furniture - to fulfil the needs of their guests, who seem perfectly visible to them but who, to us, are conspicuous by their absence.
Thea Sharrock's production makes full use of the Gate's claustrophobic confines, and in Susan Brown and Nicholas Woodeson she has two actors who understand the deep ordinariness of despair. They are deliciously suburban, like a pair of existential Pooters. There is a point where Brown's Old Woman feels her husband's arm as if it were a choice cut of lamb laid out at the butcher's. "Oh, Poppet," she squeals, "you're just so incredibly ... incredibly ..." You hear 70 years of love and contempt squeezed into five words.
What Sharrock's production fails to negotiate is the increasing sense of mania the play produces, or the drowning silences between the manic laughter and platitudes. Sharrock's production is efficient but it's not tragic and it's not farce. It sits somewhere more comfy and less disturbing so that, even at the end when the Orator turns out to be a deaf-mute who cannot orate at all, there is little sense of the utter futility of existence and of the old couple's final empty gesture.
· Until December 16. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
