It is Prague, 1968. Dr Eduard Huml is a social scientist concerned with the nature of human happiness and the way we think. He is also a man with a wife who wants him to ditch his mistress and a mistress who wants to be his wife. Huml seems incapable of action, but then he has also got his hands full with his secretary, who comes to take dictation, and a research group who have invaded his flat and are intent on asking him questions with the aid of a massive machine that seems to have a mind of its own. Well, more of a mind than anyone else present.
Vaclav Havel will almost certainly be better remembered for his presidency of the Czech Republic than for his plays, so it comes as something of a surprise to find this early Havel play, first performed at the Theatre on the Balustrade in Prague in the spring of 1968, popping up as the final offering in the Gate's Broken season.
It is not a very pleasant surprise either: this is a damp squib of a play. Its absurdism is so dated and unfunny that it is hard to imagine the rationale behind including it in a season responding to the uncertainty and dislocation that change engenders.
The work might have been encrypted and encoded to speak to its audience of 35 years ago, but it doesn't speak loudly and clearly to an audience today. Director Simon Godwin's decision to play it in period - although possibly the only sensible choice given the comedy's dinosaur sexual politics - only adds to the sense that what you are seeing is a museum piece. It may have social significance as an artefact of the Czechoslovakian dissident movement, but it has almost no significance as a piece of dramatic writing. It makes its points within the first 20 minutes and just keeps repeating them, although maybe that's the point: patterns of behaviour and thinking are hard to break. The cast give it their best shot, but the play never meets them even halfway.
· Until August 3. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
