Life is full of ironies. As I sat down to review this theatrical version of Jeanette Winterson's novel, my own PowerBook refused to work. But not even that can inhibit my enjoyment of this richly playful piece on love, storytelling, gender and the transformative power of fiction.
Appropriately, it is the first show to be staged in the National's radically transformed Lyttelton, where an intimate 600-seat space has been built on top of the old stalls. The show devised by Winterson, Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw, is a freewheeling meditation on the poleaxing nature of passion and on the capacity of invented fictional worlds to reorder reality. As staged by Warner, with set and video designs by Tom Pye, it combines the liberating gaiety of Virginia Woolf's Orlando with the emotional intensity of a 1960s Antonioni movie.
Shaw appears as a writer whose computer allows her an interactive relationship with her characters. The first story we see is of an androgynous 17th- century Turk (Pauline Lynch) who imported tulips into Holland by placing bulbs in the position of male genitalia; as a princess kisses the bulbs so tulips riotously flower. But the bulk of the 90-minute action concerns the writer's feverish relationship with a married woman (Saffron Burrows), who invades her story and takes over her life.
Winterson's ideas - that we live in a world of virtual reality, that technology has extended the boundaries of fiction and that the reader helps to write the story - are not original. But her narrative gains from the tangible physicality of theatre and gleefully combines eroticism and wit.
Warner's deft staging matches Winterson's free use of time and place. A medieval lover's descent from the flies into a glass booth takes us into the world of Lancelot and Guinevere; a swirl of Italian waiters balancing tables on their heads ushers us into a noisy Capri pizzeria. In Warner's hands the stage-space becomes as much as an imaginative playground as fiction. Shaw skilfully suggests the retentive writer torn between the imperatives of fiction and the messy realities of life, and Burrows as her married lover is both sexually teasing and emotionally slippery. An adult, entertaining, artfully devised piece.
· Until June 4. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
