Forget the history books, according to American performance artist Tim Miller; what we really need if we are to understand US history is a thorough knowledge of the Broadway musical. "Who needs Marx and Engels when we have Rodgers and Hammerstein," suggests Miller, who points out that The Sound of Music offers the defeat of fascism through "festive song and dance" and that South Pacific was banned in many Southern states for its portrait of inter-racial relationships.
The US of the title, however, refers not just to the American state (which as Miller throws in represents 4% of the world's population and uses 38% of the world's resources, and over the past 100 years has invaded 112 sovereign nations) but also to Miller and his gay partner, the Anglo-Australian Alistair, and the gay community. So Miller also offers us his reading of Fiddler On the Roof as a musical about gay marriage and the song Consider Yourself from Oliver! as a gay coming-out anthem.
The playwright Tony Kushner summed up Miller well when he wrote: "Tim sings the song of the self which interrogates, with exploding and subversive joy and freedom, the constitution and the borderlines of selfhood." US is a case in point. It is a goodbye letter - angry, sorrowful, and resentful - to the country that raised Miller and now rejects him because it does not recognise same-sex marriage: Alistair's work permit has run out and he must leave America.
Miller has made an art of his life, and he continues to do so here in a show that is rough and raw, as inconsistent and uneven as life itself, and entirely without artifice. There are no fictions here; no made-up dramas of lives torn apart, because it really is happening. Don't expect Ethel Merman or firework theatrics. Miller doesn't mention La Cage Aux Folles and the defiant gay anthem, I Am What I Am. That's because US just is what it is.
· Until May 8. Box office: 020-7307 5060.
