A Hollywood tear-jerker

Alexa Asjes's stage adaptation of a 1960s, tear-stained Hollywood weepie, in which a trailer-trash, blind white girl, Selina, unknowingly falls for a black man, generates a strong emotional charge.

The power and the pathos of this theatre version of A Patch of Blue, filmed with Sidney Poitier and Shelley Winters, owes plenty to the way that it reminds us of the intensity of white racial bigotry in 1960s America and how the malady still lingers on.

It owes most to the remarkable poignancy and histrionic conviction of Miss Asje's wrenching performance as Selina, whose serpentine mother (Elizabeth Elvin) and drunken grandfather come fresh from melodrama land.

Eyes fixed in a blank stare, physically precarious, Miss Asjes's withdrawn, childlike Selena is one day deposited in a park. Here Gordon, a black newspaper sub-editor, astutely played with an interesting blend of desire, diffidence and compassion by Eugene Washington, befriends her and Selina, overwhelmed by kindness, succumbs to love in a trice.

In an America where black and white sexual relations are still anathematised, Gordon does not, though, dare to admit his colour.

A stinging sense of irony possesses the action: Gordon and his hospital intern brother are civilised, middle-class members of society while Selena, reared in trailer-trash society, has been schooled to anathematise black people. "I hate everything black, I've got enough black in my life," Selena explains, recalling that blue and red are the only colours she remembers.

When Gordon finally confesses, her furious response and the resolution of the impasse avoid the easy resort of a happy ending. Bronwen Carr's irritating production requires excessive scene changes, but, oh, how touched I was by this dramatised old movie.

Until 15 May. Information: 020 226 1916.

A Patch Of Blue