Ideas go only skin-deep

You can see the question South African playwright Dirk de Villiers is asking in this play: are the ties of flesh and blood more powerful than racial conditioning? It's 1970, apartheid is at its height and white South Africans Kay and Philip Keebler have just hired a black girl, Christine, from the convent as their maid. Kay is peremptory and bossy with her, while Philip is kinder, something that is later badly misinterpreted by both Christine and Kay's ghastly cousin Myra. Their liberal teenage daughter Sally, meanwhile, who has a white boyfriend of possible black extraction, can't understand her parents' politics and just wants to be Christine's friend.

De Villiers frames the action within the Truth And Reconciliation Commission that took place some 30 years later as Philip comes seeking atonement for a crime, the ambiguous nature of which only emerges during the course of the play.

De Villiers is at pains to emphasise the feverish atmosphere of 1970s Cape Town, in which it is illegal for white men to consort with black women and in which the law of the state has authority over inviolable human instincts such as maternalism and love.

Yet, the melodramatic narrative, wooden characterisation and sledgehammer subtlety stymies de Villiers's efforts to explore these ideas in a plausible and useful way. Despite an excellent central performance from Rosalyn Wright as Christine, John-Jackson Almond's bitty production has the fluidity of treacle and the play never gets beneath the skin of its subject matter.

Until Sep 10, New End Theatre, 27 New End NW3, Tue to Sat 7.30pm, Sat and Sun mats 3.30pm, £17, £12 concs. Tel: 0870 033 2733. Tube: Hampstead

Christine
New End Theatre
New End, Heath Street, Hampstead, NW3 1JD