Chinese theatre has had a big effect on western drama: Bertolt Brecht, Thornton Wilder and Peter Shaffer are among the writers who have borrowed its techniques. But not many of us are experts on 14th century Yuan drama so I hastened to the Young Vic Studio to catch this rare example. I emerged an hour later more impressed by Tom Wright's delicately stylised production than by the dramatic content.
The title of Cheng Teh-Hui's play is certainly dead accurate. The eponymous heroine is a shy 17-year-old whose mother arranged her marriage at birth. But when her future husband, an ambitious scholar, goes off to sit the imperial exam, she is utterly bereft. While she pines on her sick bed, her soul rises from her body, takes corporeal form and pursues the departing student. Three years later he returns to find the original Ch'ien-nu mortally ill: only when her body and soul are reunited is harmony restored.
The religious overtones are obvious but all sorts of human questions go unanswered. Why does the mother introduce the intended husband as the heroine's "elder brother"? And why does the heroine have to suffer three years of hell because of her vagrant soul? There are no answers because the questions are irrelevant. This is narrative rather than psychological drama. One assumes the 14th century audience would have been sufficiently beguiled by the mix of story, movement and song not to ask too many awkward questions. But today it is hard not to feel cheated by the imposed happy ending and by the assumption that women's role in life is one of agonised submission.
However alien the story, Wright's production is aesthetically charming. He has the advantage of a wonderful set by Jon Bausor in which a slate grey platform is surrounded by suspended bamboo sticks and a fissured, crumbling wall. Wright also gets the actors to underscore each line with stylised hand gestures and supple body movements: when Sandy Grierson's hero returns to find his bride ailing his trunk arches and bends in sorrow like a sapling in a gale.
Wright, whose debut production this is, creates exactly the right mood of tormented lyricism. Kate Webster as the bodily Ch'ien-nu, claiming that "love is the most fatal sickness of all", looks suitably stricken while Emma Fildes gives the impression that her soul is a good time girl who relishes her freedom. Everything is done with delicacy, lightness and economy. But in the end the pleasure the show offers is largely anthropological: I felt I'd learned a good deal about the customs of 14th century China without finding my own soul haled from my body.
· Until June 29. Box office: 020-7928 6363.
