Imagine the scene. You are Jean-Jacques, a reasonably well-heeled young Parisian lawyer, a partner in your own practice. You have just bid farewell to the woman with whom you have spent the night, and are rushing around your elegant studio flat getting ready for an important business appointment for which you are late.
Then you discover that a strange young woman has wandered into your flat and shows every sign of settling in. What do you do? Ask her politely to leave? Forcibly eject her? Call the police? Not Jean-Jacques. This man - a man who lives such a well-ordered life that he lists his sexual conquests in a little black book - skips off to work leaving this complete stranger in his flat.
Drama is full of the unexpected, the exceptions that prove the rule, improbabilities that seem entirely natural. A stranger suddenly moves into your flat and you can't budge her. After a while you don't want to budge her; you race home to check she is still there. It sounds like something out of Pinter, doesn't it? Improbable, but also unsettling, maybe even menacing.
Not, alas, in Jean-Claude Carriere's limp play. Here the improbable merely seems silly. The actors - Paul McGann as Jean-Jacques and Susannah Harker as the strange woman, Suzanne - play the script as if they don't believe a word of it. Who can blame them?
Solvene Tiffou's stilted translation doesn't help much. The whole thing sounds as if it is still in French or as if every word has inverted commas around it. The production looks chic in Julie Marabelle's design, but it is clumsy, with long blackouts after each scene, and lazily paced.
Who is Suzanne? Is she one of Jean-Jacques's forgotten conquests? Is she his nemesis or his salvation? Who knows. Who cares. If the playwright, directors and actors don't appear to, why should I?
· Until March 15. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
