Bestiality - a welcome first

How strange, how wickedly pleasurable it is to welcome the first play on the London stage about bestiality. In Edward Albee's latest reminder of the fragilities and temptations of married life, Jonathan Pryce's fraught 50-year-old husband, Martin, falls passionately in love with a goat called Sylvia. And what is more that love is consummated - off-stage and often - until Martin's understandably upset wife, Kate Fahy's Stevie, intervenes.

The traditional-minded may dismiss this black tragi-comedy, which won New York's Tony award for best play in 2002, as pandering to the dirty-minded. It seems to me no such unlovely thing. On the contrary, The Goat, with its persistent undertow of humour, is as humane as it is provocative. It is a painful parable about the limits of our tolerance and our refusal to try for compassion or understanding when someone we love seems to betray us by outraging conventions of morality and behaviour.

It also strikes severe blows at self-appointed moralists who ignore promises of confidentiality, and in so doing destroy a family.

Jonathan Pryce looks a rather elderly 50, but his remarkable performance as Martin - a famous architect who inhabits Hildegard Bechtler's sumptuous white apartment with pillars, imposing gallery and precious objets d'art - rises to a high point of anger and down to sobbing despair.

At first he simmers mildly, his attention distracted. Stevie observes him with suspicion. Then he confesses to best friend Ross he has fallen in love, in a scene suitably played as situation comedy, flecked with dramatic irony: the audience has divined the secret.

Matthew Marsh's swaggering Ross believes his friend has fallen for a blonde bimbo until Martin hands over a photo and sparks his disgust, which Ross transmits to Stevie via secret-breaching letter.

The illicit love - which can be taken to represent any form of deviant behaviour we brand as sub-human - is exposed, and Stevie vents her fury on her goat-fancying husband. Can he explain his secret?

Stevie, melodramatically required to destroy pictures and objects in her fury, needs to be played as someone overwhelmed with pain as well as revulsion. But Fahy does not sufficiently surrender to grief or vituperation. However the sheer dynamism of Anthony Page's astutely pitched production still manages to raise the emotional temperature.

Pryce's flailing, shuffling Martin, and his gay teenage son, played with vehemence by Eddie Redmayne, together suggest how fragile are the ties that bind us.

And the final coup de theatre bloodily underlines Albee's point about our potential as intolerant fanatics.

The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?