How can we be good in a big, bad world? Long before Nick Hornby raised the question, Bertolt Brecht was tackling the issue in this parable about Shen Te, a Setzuan prostitute who is rewarded by the gods for being the only person in the entire city prepared to give them a bed for the night. Soon she has swapped prostitution for shopkeeping, and poverty for a modicum of affluence.
But is it harder to be good when you've got a silver dollar rather than a hole in your pocket? Shen Te is soon besieged by manipulative freeloaders she is too kind to rid herself of, but when her ruthless cousin Shui Ta makes an unexpected appearance he has none of Shen Te's qualms.
This is a difficult one to call: a good play that seldom comes off in performance. Tanika Gupta's easy, contemporary translation should have cracked it however, and in a better production than this one it might. But an awkward, unhelpful design results in an evening that hovers uneasily between old and new, and whose pace drags because of awkward set changes. It not only fails to find rhythm but also a distinctive voice of its own.
There is a jarring of tone: the jokey and glamorous rockstar-style gods seem to have wandered in from an entirely different show. The evening is saved by two things: Brecht's straightforward storytelling, and a performance by Yaa, as both the benign Shen Te and the swaggering Shui Ta, that is so delightful and convincing it's hard to believe there are not two actors involved.
· Until May 6. Box office: 0870 330 3131.
