Death merchants brought to account

Kenneth Jupp's play about the 1945 Nuremberg trials, in which Nazi war leaders were tried for crimes against humanity, comes to a shocking climax. You would think that after infinite historical and artistic exegesis, there was scant chance of casting Hitler's Germany in a fresh light.

Jupp does not shine a revelatory torch, but using the Nuremberg trials he talks up a symbiotic connection between international banking and the Nazi regime. Auriol Smith's evocative production, with records of period songs of love and regret set in effective, jarring contrast to the courtroom horrors, suffers the effects of miscasting but packs both an emotional and cerebral punch.

I do not know whether Jupp has bent history to his theatrical demands. But a programme note quotes a 2002 Sunday Times report that US Treasury department documents and records show how the Chase Manhattan Bank acted for Hitler and channelled Nazi funds to him after the US entered the war.

Tosca's Kiss is framed through the experience of the novelist Rebecca West, an observer at the press desk of the Nuremberg trials . The play juxtaposes West's musings on the trial of Hitler's minister of economics, Hjalmar Schacht, who serves as his own defence counsel. A ghastly tension rises as Steven Elder's rather-too-casual American prosecutor brings home the ghastly torture of death by gassing.

The brisk, rigorous West, whom Julia Watson makes far too winsome and actressy, wonders why Schacht, unlike the bestial merchants of the Holocaust alongside him, remains serene and supercilious.

At last Schacht, magnificently played by Charles Kay with an expression and voice of implacable self-confidence, makes his apology: the German economic miracle was made possible by capitalist banks in America, France and Great Britain, with even the manufacturers of the death camp's cyanide gas, a subsidiary of Standard Bank.

Extraneous allusions to Puccini's self-sacrificial heroine and a cloying,romantic subplot, involving West and David Yelland sounding utterly English as an American judge at Nuremberg, scarcely detract from the chilling force of Tosca's kiss.

Until 3 June. Information: 020 8940 3633.

Tosca's Kiss