Crazy, deeply moving Heroes

The sound of Heroes is the sound of a direct theatrical hit, a boulevard comedy bull's-eye. Not since John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson kept me moist-eyed in my youth, during David Storey's Home in 1970, have I been so amused or moved by two old men going gently out of their minds.

Gerald Sibleyras's 90-minute French comedy, given an elegant English gloss by its translator Tom Stoppard and the ironic title Heroes, achieves a seductive fusion of the comic, sad and absurd.

Set in 1959 and a French retirement home for First World War veterans, Thea Sharrock's eloquent production sounds a requiem for lives long since wrecked on the battle fields. At first there is something contrived about the men's eccentricities.

Yet once these lonely inmates are fired by the idea of a trip beyond the garden walls Heroes spirals into a comedy of madcap illusions,
about the inevitable need to fantasise and our longings to escape lives of eternal emptiness.

Robert Jones's beautiful stage design, a stonewalled, summer garden, fringed with poplar trees, betrays a suitably oppressive air of loneliness and decay: the plants all look on their last legs.

This milieu serves as the private meeting place for three inmates bound by ties of nothing much. John Hurt's spell-binding Gustave, a self-styled leader in a three-piece brown suit, too terrified to venture beyond the grounds, sets the black comedy tone.

Hurt, got up to look rather like Samuel Beckett, denounces each month of the year for the fathomless boredom they bring. Richard Griffiths's endearing Henri, whose apparent grip on sanity is looser than it seems and Ken Stott's far younger Philippe, prone to tumble suddenly asleep - even into the odd, open grave - thanks to shrapnel lodged in his head, sit near by.

Storey's Home rates as a far more profound play, but Heroes keeps you hooked by gradually letting you realise and relish how far gone and still going these quarrelsome chaps really are. "I'm going mad, Henri," comes the complaint.

"Don't worry. You're with us," comes the unreassuring retort. The womanless chaps brood conventionally with nice humour over sex. They wonder whether it is better to induce laughter or a climax in them.

Griffiths's dirty old Henri, having discovered a near-by girls' school, wistfully hankers for a "long-limbed lily" of a girl. Yet vestiges of normality will leak away. Ken Stott's lovely Philippe, all emotionally dishevelled, just knows he has to kill the new inmate who shares his birthday. And that stone dog, surely he says, it moves of its own volition?