French with tears

London theatre has seen rather a lot of French playwright Yasmina Reza over the past few years. Art, her witty spin on modern art and friendship, was a long running ¸ber-hit and Life x 3 also enjoyed its share of success. With no new plays available for performance at the moment, actress Susie Lindeman, together with director Mark Kilmurry, has chosen to adapt Reza's first novel. It can only be a matter of time before her juvenilia is given a stage outing.

Reza's plays, which certainly have their detractors, are at least frothy concoctions underpinned by structures of iron. Ominously, Hammerklavier consists of 44 meandering, tenuously connected vignettes narrated by and telling of a French author named Yasmina.

She and her father share a love for Beethoven's Opus 106, the "Hammerklavier" sonata; she goes to concerts, and Switzerland, quite a lot. People ail or say wispy, elegiac things, or combine the two; time passes in a resolutely non-linear fashion. Lines such as, "At the end of patience, the world is one soul dwelling," are bandied about without even a hint of irony.

But before we can bring ourselves to fish the unappealing self-obsession and cod philosophising out of the fragmented narrative, there are a number of aural and visual obstacles to overcome. Not least of these, apart from the adoption of an entirely superfluous French accent, is the fact that the production budget doesn't appear to have stretched to buying Lindeman a skirt.

Spectrally thin, she is clothed only in a slightly lengthened black velour shirt, which makes for some interesting manoeuvres when sitting down is called for. Or lying down for that matter on the chaise longue that, like every other prop, is swathed in red velvet and lurches into and out of focus at every strangely programmed change of the lights.

Lindeman, as her exemplary turn as Dolly Wilcox in the film Howards End proved, is a fine actress who is worthy of so much more than this French and Saunders Gallic spoof-fodder. For, while few pieces of theatre can truly be described as excruciating, Hammerklavier is an honourable exception.

Until 27 September. Box office: 020 7287 2875.

Hammerklavier