We're at the fag end of a drinks party. There are empty wine bottles on the table, balloons on the floor, and we, the audience, are crashed out on cosy leather sofas. Then our host starts speaking.
He's visited a poor country, he tells us, and has been contaminated with something: a sense of the world's injustice. What excuse is there for our wealth and others' destitution? What use to the poor are our crumbs of liberal concern? Are we the decent people we think we are? You can't vaccinate against this stuff. Malaria would have been easier to cure.
There's no gainsaying the moral seriousness of Wallace Shawn's 1990 monologue. Nor any shrinking its challenge to examine one's own stake in first-world greed and complacency. One of The Fever's most forceful points is that what we believe makes no difference to either our moral standing or the plight of the poor. It's what we do that counts. And we'll never make poverty history until we sacrifice much more than the price of a wristband.
But The Fever overplays its hand. Its narrator accuses us of believing "that the way the world works is fundamentally not unjust" - which isn't my view, nor necessarily the view of this production's likely audience. The play's "with the poor or against them" argument, meanwhile, is positively Bush-like in its fundamentalism. With global justice higher up the public agenda than 15 years ago, Shawn's clarion call can now seem presumptuous and overemphatic.
The problem is compounded by director/ performer Joe Hill-Gibbins' drinks party conceit. If I were being lectured like this at a friend's house, I'd have taken issue or headed for the door long before the host's spiel had run its 90-minute course. Mind you, Hill-Gibbins performs the monologue excellently, as a likable, civilised fellow squirming now to escape, now to embrace the awareness of his own corruption. This is our conscience speaking - albeit sometimes too stridently for its own good.
· Until August 7. Box office: 020-7978 7040.
