Sebastian Barry writes like an angel; but I sometimes feel it is a recording rather than a dramatic angel. And, while his latest piece has an eloquence unmatched on the London stage, its intersecting narratives deny us the familiar satisfactions of a play.
Barry's setting is a Victorian railway station waiting room, beautifully realised in Simon Higlett's design, occupied by two non-communicating figures. One, Dr Barry, is a military doctor who reminisces about his Irish upbringing, his career in the colonies. The other figure is Florence Nightingale; and she too looks back on her corseted origins, defiance of convention by going to the Crimea and the "filth of fame".
Where, however, Florence Nightingale voluntarily broke with Victorian expectations, Dr Barry was born female but reared as a man. Left destitute in London as a teenager, she was sexually transformed by a patron and packed off to Edinburgh to train as an army doctor. And, while the play explores the professional enmity and differing reputations of its two historical figures, it highlights their damaged sense of correspondence.
You can see what fascinates the author: "the lost fields of womanhood" and the personal griefs that accompanied an expansive empire. His writing is also burnished with a shimmering prose-poetry. Dr Barry talks of "the strange original that is an Irish person" and "the toothless Leviathan of poverty" that lies across Victorian London. Only occasionally does the language seem richer in sound than sense. When Florence talks of the vats of faeces at Scutari you wonder what she means by "the wild broken music of that stench."
But writing is not the same as drama; and what one misses is not just interaction but any real sense of narrative momentum. Only at the end does the play touch the heart; and that is because the characters achieve mutual recognition and because the doctor has a beautiful speech about the mercy of God comparable to Sonya's final exhortation in Uncle Vanya.
The main pleasure, however, comes from watching Kathryn Hunter as Dr Barry: with her husky voice and stance, she persuades you of the character's enforced maleness while lapsing into a nostalgic femininity. Claire Bloom also brings out the bitterness and solitude of Miss Nightingale. But while Robert Delamere's production works hard to lend the play theatricality, what you are left with is a rich text that demands to be read as much as enacted.
· Until June 19. Box office: 020-7359 4404.
