My heart doesn't entirely warm to Tom Stoppard's 1975 play. It brings together Lenin, James Joyce and dadaist Tristan Tzara, all at one point living in Zurich during the first world war, and entwines them with a production of The Importance of Being Earnest featuring a British consulate official called Henry Carr.
Stoppard's play is undeniably dazzling and popping with intellectual fireworks and excitement at its own daring, but it is the kind of dazzle that makes you want to lie down in a darkened room. I had every sympathy with the woman who, 10 minutes in, turned to her companion and asked: "Is this play written in English?"
It undoubtedly is (mostly), and it is worth staying the course just to marvel at the way Stoppard constructs his Alice in Wonderland edifice. It is like watching someone spinning plates, although here the plates are intellectual conceits.
He doesn't break one, but gets so carried away by his own cleverness that it starts to obscure the real and very fascinating theme of the play: art and revolution, and whether art can ever be more than an indulgence.
You also have to accept that this is early Stoppard: all brain and show and very little heart. Only occasionally in its function as a memory play, narrated by Carr, a man who missed the train and history with it, does the drama try to engage with the audience emotionally.
This is an unashamedly elitist evening that would be an utter bore for anyone unacquainted with Bolshevik politics, the works of James Joyce, Gilbert and Sullivan and Oscar Wilde, first world war history and radical artistic movements. But although it is sometimes intensely annoying, like all good plays it reaches out beyond its confines.
Richard Baron's inventive production is a work of art in its own right, every bit as cuckoo as the play as it conjures libraries, Heidi- inspired alpine meadows and a real sense of history on the run.
· Until May 17. Box office: 0115-941 9419.
