Mike Kenny's new adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's fishy tale is charm itself. It looks a treat, in a design by Karen Tennent that is all aquamarine glitter, mystery, and a prince's party ship, lit by fairy lights, which bobs along on top of one of the actor's heads. This transports you to the watery part of the world with real confidence.
This show is simple and comic enough to delight a five-year-old, but doesn't shirk the terrible pain and darker side of Andersen's story: the mermaid princess sacrificing the best part of herself - her tail and her voice - for legs, in the hope of winning the love of the landlubber prince she adores.
This little mermaid has blood on her ballet pumps, not, of course, that her self-absorbed prince notices. He's too busy falling in love with another woman. Kenny's version offers all the (Freudian) signs and symbols if you want to look for them, but it also offers plenty of straightforward slapstick fun. Yet even here this show is deceptive, always operating on more than one level, just as the cast of two play more than one role and are not just players in the tale but the storytellers too.
Indeed, this is as much about how you tell a story (the tale-tellers Flotsam and Jetsam are always falling out) as it is about the narrative of a girl who loves too much and too unwisely. Andersen's tale always strikes me as incredibly misogynistic. Kenny doesn't shirk that either. Instead, he plays to it, even to the point that the mermaid's elder sisters are portrayed by Barbie dolls.
It lasts less than an hour, but lingers in the depths of the mind much longer.
· Until July 30. Box office: 020-8543 4888.
