True life fiction? When you write about Mata Hari, says dramatist Diane Samuels, the two are hard to separate. With this new play, dealing with the interrogation and sentence in first world war France of the seductress turned spy, the Palace Theatre may be hoping to emulate the success of Samuels' Kindertransport, which transferred from this venue to the West End.
Greta Scacchi has stepped in to provide the now obligatory film star ballast. But, given that its heroine's sexiness was held responsible for the deaths of 50,000 Allied soldiers, Lawrence Till's production maintains a disappointingly frigid temperature.
No doubt buoyed by the news that Mata Hari's hometown of Leeuwarden is pressing France to reopen her case, Samuels launches a stout defence of this archetypal femme fatale. Her Mata Hari is an Oscar Wilde-alike martyr: arrogant, sassy and always one step ahead of her leaden prosecutors. It's her skill at manipulating powerful men, and the sexual threat she poses to the likes of Jonathan Oliver's straight-backed Captain Bouchardon, that turn France against her. And when the powers-that-be need a scapegoat, as her lawyer (Leonard Fenton) informs her, the erotic mystery that surrounds Mata Hari - real name Margaretha Zelle - can easily be made to reek of treacherous deception.
Scacchi can do sultry effortlessly. She's less successful capturing the grandiloquent self-delusion of the condemned Mata Hari. The role cries out for a larger-than-life presence; Scacchi plays it in the lower key.
Mind you, Samuels herself neutralises the dramatic potency of Mata Hari's radical libertarianism by attributing it to damaging relationships with the men in her life.
The evening, ultimately, feels like a meditation rather than a drama. Samuels has sought to spice proceedings up with a play-acting motif, whereby scenes from Mata Hari's past are brought to life by her two interrogators, and later by an entertainingly foul-mouthed nun. But the production can't quite summon the playfulness or dynamic energy to make them credible. While it communicates Samuels' imaginative fascination with Mata Hari, we never feel we are in the company of a personality once thought capable of winning, or losing, a war.
· Until March 28. Box office: 01923 225671.
