If you want theatrical gossip, waspish wit and scurrilous anecdote, then by all means go and see Corin Redgrave as Kenneth Tynan, the world-famous spanker. Actually, Tynan was a great theatre critic, a peerless profiler of the stars of stage and screen and one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the National Theatre. But you would hardly know it from Richard Nelson and Colin Chambers' adaptation of Tynan's diaries. This is because they date from the last 10 years of his life when, without a platform for his work, often at odds with Olivier, deeply in debt and dying from emphysema, Tynan was Icarus in freefall.
But the fall is only interesting and only truly tragic if you know how close he flew to the sun. This 90-minute production fails to make that clear. It is too busy concentrating on Tynan's spanking obsession and explosive experiments with vodka enemas.
It's very funny because Tynan had a great turn of phrase, but it has no more purpose or value than another late-night Channel 5 documentary on Britney Spears' shopping habits. It is just celebrity tittle tattle, when what you really want to know is whether the things that made Tynan a great critic were also the things that made him such a flawed human being.
Alas, by the time he wrote these diaries, Tynan was more concerned with the state of his penis (bending to one side) than he was about the state of theatre, and to concentrate entirely on this period of his life just diminishes him.
Redgrave is very good, but not good enough to stop you wishing that you had stayed home to read the diaries. Or, better still, to read some of Tynan's dazzling criticism.
· Until March 26. Box office: 020-7836 3334.
