Over 30 years ago Woody Allen wrote a series of short stories for The New Yorker that in tone owed a lot to Raymond Chandler. Only in the case of Allen's booze-sodden, sad-eyed private detective, Kaiser Lupowitz, the crimes he investigates all have an intellectual or philosophical twist. The beautiful young model called Heather Butkiss who turns up at Lupowitz's seedy offices has an unusual request: she demands that he finds God. Soon Lupowitz is trailing the streets of New York in search of the elusive "Mr Big". Then there is the desperate man, who doesn't want his wife to know he has been employing the services of a specialist call-girl agency where young women "thumb penguin classics provocatively" and clients are offered the opportunity to have "Noam Chomsky explained by two girls". The man is being blackmailed: "They've got tapes of me discussing The Waste Land," he cries.
These quirky stories of New York life are the two that work the best in Janey Clarke's adaptation and staging. The material is always engaging in its fanciful absurdism and opportunities for mental gymnastics, even if it never quite escapes its origins on the page. But there is plenty of fun in these stories of human folly and two-timing human nature and Clarke gets the atmosphere just right, offering a jazzy, smoky evocation of a city that seems to exist permanently in the witching hour and is peopled by Mafiosi, nervous rabbis, peroxide blondes, poker players, gangsters' molls and assorted lowlife.
The cast - all talented musicians - add a layer of atmosphere with musical interludes that encompass jazzy riffs and yearning torch songs, and although they don't always hit all the right notes with the New York accents, they conjure a real sense of a city and its vivid, neurotic, on-the-make, lovelorn inhabitants.
· Until February 19. Box office: 020-8680 4060.
