Eugene O'Neill was a pioneer. One of his forgotten achievements was to create, in this 1920 expressionist piece, the first serious American play about black experience. Even if you are always conscious that it is a white man's view, it is thrilling to see it brought to life in Paterson Joseph's towering performance and Thea Sharrock's brilliant production.
In little more than an hour, O'Neill offers us a kaleidoscopic vision of black American history. His titular hero is an ex-Pullman car porter who has become demagogic overlord of a small Caribbean island. Warned of an impending coup, he goes on the run through a dark forest in which he experiences nightmarish visions of shackled chain-gang prisoners, black slaves inspected like cattle by white planters and a bone-rattling witch doctor who seems to embody his own enslavement to superstition.
Condensing the piece imposes an inevitable crudity on O'Neill's vision. But he never lets us forget that Brutus Jones's brief tyranny is both the product of historic oppression of his people and potent white example. Above all, O'Neill expresses his ideas through a heightened theatricality in which the tom-toms, the hallucinations and the enclosing forest are all as significant as the language.
All this is vividly realised in Sharrock's production. Richard Hudson's set is a narrow box, like a sand-filled sarcophagus. Adam Silverman's ominous lighting and Gregory Clarke's echoing soundscape add to the sense of entombment. Joseph, starting out as a fearsome, gold-braided figure squatting on a leopard-skin cushion, disintegrates into a juddering wreck. But his greatest achievement is to make you feel that his visions, embodied by 16 actors, are the product of his tormented mind. Paul Wyett as a cockney trader and Dwayne Barnaby as a witch doctor lend vital support. And, even if O'Neill's play was superseded, it survives as a historic landmark and a shattering piece of theatre.
· Until December 17. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
