Laboured in love

William Carlos Williams's creative interests were initially biological - as a paediatrician, he delivered well over 2,000 babies - but at college his friendships with writers Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle inspired him to labours that were also poetical. Although he remained a doctor all his life, his rebellion against the artifice of verse, and experiments with prose poetry, made him an avantgarde hero who counted Allen Ginsberg as one of his followers. In 1963 - the year of his death - he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Many Loves was first staged in New York in 1959, after a gestation period of almost two decades, and ran for nearly a year. It is difficult to see why this collection of short plays had such a generous first run, since they subvert any formal notion of theatre with more of a whimper than a bang, with four cobweb-frail images of love that climax in an unconvincingly anarchic wedding ceremony.

One of the most arresting metaphors comes from Hubert, who cries: "If I wish to present love dramatically today ... I might do it with a coalscuttle. By spitting in it." After a theatre company protested that it was too difficult to stage the short, unrelated plays individually (well, that was their excuse), Williams - with a Pirandello-style flourish - created a fourth play about this young writer, Hubert, who has created the three other dramas and is desperate to encourage a wealthy older admirer, Peter, to finance their staging.

Unfortunately, as Peter cries "I don't see the point" and underlines his inability to see any structure or tension in the scenarios depicted, it is impossible not to agree with him. The presentation is deliberately anti-theatrical - for several minutes it seems as if the audience is wearing a mass cloak of invisibility, as the actors chat, whisper, giggle among themselves as if no one was there to watch them. In, for instance, the first playlet, where a young man is in love with an older married woman (Serafina), should the complexity Hubert promises merely emerge as botched naivete?

The Lilian Baylis Theatre also seems too large for any of these unrelated playlets, so that, spatially, the audience member feels initially alienated, and then, as the evening progresses, disengaged.

Aria Sandis stands out, but that is far from enough in a production that slows, rather than speeds, the heart.

Many Loves