It is a long plod to death in Strindberg's last play, a poetic and autobiographical reckoning of one man's life. The man - Hunter - is on a walking holiday in the Alps, sticking with the peaks and seeking, high up in the crystal air of the mountains, "my own self, which I lost below". He meets the Wanderer and is dragged down to the villages he once knew, encountering along the way people from his past and facing up to the spectre of death.
There are times when this journey has an Alice in Wonderland appeal, as he meets two squabbling millers with their windmills, dubbed Adam and Eve, and a village where they are so mad that the sane are put under observation.
Gregory Motton's translation is good in the way it captures a weird sense of "otherness" as the play seems to hover between reality and somewhere else entirely, so it feels a little like the dream of a dying man slipping in and out of consciousness. There are times when it is so lonely it makes you shiver.
But the play ties itself up in knots of riddles and symbolism, and lacks the originality and freedom of form of A Dream Play or The Ghost Sonata, and some of the writing suggests that if Strindberg had lived 100 years later he would have made a killing as a new age guru spouting such nonsense as: "He who tries to save himself loses himself," and "We are all strangers to each other, or become so. We all travel incognito."
This kind of stuff is tedious and detracts from more emotionally engaging sequences such as a Japanese man's serene surrender to the cleansing fire of death. Stephen Boxer as Hunter and Laurence Penry-Jones as Wanderer do valiant work, but it is largely a wasted journey.
· Until March 4. Box office: 020-7229 0706
