Theatre de L'Ange Fou's production of Nikolai Gogol's mid-19th-century satire bursts with ideas and visual invention. The problem is that the play, about the residents of a small Russian town who are duped by their own greed and obsequiousness into believing that an impostor is an important government official, would be better served by fewer ideas and less visual invention.
This evening has such a sense of style that you can see why people are impressed by it - plenty raved about it when it was on in Edinburgh. But if it is worth seeing, it is largely as an object lesson in how not to meld classic texts and visual theatre. Theatre de L'Ange Fou has ruthlessly imposed its style on the play, rather than finding a performance style that springs from the text. In theatre that is the difference between an impostor and the real thing.
This is not quite the disaster it might be, because in some ways the house style - lots of expansive gestures repeated very, very slowly by lots of performers in tableaux - is well-suited to the grotesqueries of Gogol's story. At its best the piece conveys a comic hellishness, like Dickens crossed with Hieronymus Bosch. Matthew Britten's lighting is full of shadow and illumination, unexpected planes and shafts of light. But the relentlessness of the performance style wears you down; added to a busy soundtrack and projected images, it leads to sensory overload.
I know the play pretty well, but even so I was hard pressed to follow what was going on. It would seem to me that any company that feels the need to provide a page of explanation in the programme, so that audiences have a chance at following its attempt at visual theatre, has forgotten that theatre is about telling stories. This company is not untalented, but its energies are misdirected.
· Until February 9. Box office: 020-7609 1800.
