You wait years for a play about Cuban cigar factories and then two come along in six months. First there was Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics. Now comes a first stage work by Steven Knight who wrote the screenplay for Dirty Pretty Things.
But, despite superb production and design, the play feels like a piece of tourist exotica from our man not in Havana. Knight's setting is a dusty cigar factory; and the crisis stems from the fact that the druggy senior roller, Miguel Fernando, is in shock because his lover, Alexandra, is on a boat to Key West.
In the course of a single, traumatic day we see the heroin addict hero declaring himself president of the work-room. He attempts to introduce democracy into the workplace, resists voodoo attempts to learn his lover's fate and discovers the true facts about her origins.
I don't doubt Knight's research; the problem is he has done too much. The play is like a series of boxes being assiduously ticked.
We learn that the rollers depend on music while they work. We are reminded that ancient superstitions survive even in a socialist state and that gay people stay firmly in the closet under Castro's rule.
Above all we see that, even if Cuba is a "a tiny ulcer in the belly of America", the dreams of its young are shaped by the culture of its imperialist neighbour.
The play feels like an outsider's report rather than an insider's vision. And, in a desperate attempt to over-compensate, Knight gives us reams of plot and lashings of atmosphere. But Knight's play simply confirms the point made by Michael Frayn's Cuba-based Clouds: that all visions of other cultures are subjective.
But Bunny Christie has created a miraculous set: a symphony in brown filled with dilapidated desks and stacked-up tobacco-bales. And Howard Davies's meticulous production creates moments of visual poetry as when Alexandra's emanation floats through the factory. Paul Hilton as the highly strung hero, Stephen Moore as a jaundiced roller, Jim Carter as a melancholic cigar taster and Noma Dumezweni as his obliging mistress also give impeccable performances. The production reeks of authenticity; it is the play itself that lacks the tang of lived experience.
· In rep until August 27. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
