Plays change with time. When Nikolai Erdman wrote The Mandate in 1924 it was praised by Lunacharsky, the Commissar for Culture, as "the first truly Soviet play". Now, translated and directed by Declan Donnellan, it seems like a bilious attack on the panic, fear and loss of identity of post-revolutionary Russia.
Erdman's weapon, as in his later The Suicide, is farce: the plot suggests Gogol crossed with Ray Cooney. We watch, astonished, as a family of ex-grocers tries to marry into a group of closet Tsarist romantics. The dowry for the daughter, however, has to be a bona fide communist. So we see the petty bourgeoisie frantically seeking to rustle up a group of fake proletarian relatives and Pavel, the son of the house, brandishing a mandate to prove he is a genuine party member. But, like everything in Erdman's world, even that turns out to be less than it seems.
In one way history has not been kind to the play. We know too much about the Stalinist terror to laugh full-throatedly at the sight of a rabid informer, brilliantly though he is played by Adrian Scarborough, eager to denounce everyone to the militia.
But what keeps Erdman's play afloat is its sheer farcical energy and obsessive preoccupation with identity. These reach their apotheosis in the sight of a cook who is bun dled into a trunk wearing a gown allegedly belonging to Anastasia and who is then taken by the royalists as her miraculous incarnation.
The difficulty lies in hitting the right tone for a play in which mistaken identity is a matter of life and death rather than a source of embarrassment. But Donnellan gets it right by playing the whole thing in broadly inverted commas. Catherine Jayes' score gives the evening a jazzy 20s feel. Frenziedly stylised movement punctuates each scene. And the actors perform with appropriately flustered exaggeration.
Martin Hutson is particularly good at showing Pavel's sinister growth from mother's boy to petty tyrant. Deborah Findlay flounces adroitly as the grocer's preening wife and Sinead Matthews is a real discovery as the gullible cook who, invited to wax the lodger's drooping moustache, cries: "I don't seem to be able to get it up."
The play makes compelling viewing for lovers of farce or students of Russia's tormented past.
· In rep until January 15. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
