Maestro of outrage

Neil Bartlett, the first openly gay artistic director to run a major London theatre, ends his remarkably adventurous decade at Hammersmith with a fascinating version of this most rampantly heterosexual of plays.

In a characteristic style of subversion, Bartlett persuasively stages Molière's black, ironic satire within a grand, late 19th century hotel lobby, upholstered in maroon and black with candelabras.

Knowing functionaries breathe a discreet air of decadence. It is as if the costumes of staff and guests, Bartlett explains in a preface to his elegantly modernised translation, could also have been worn in Oscar Wilde's Savoy or von Aschenbach's Lido in Death in Venice.

Despite these little, homosexual lurches, Bartlett has not followed Freud in renewing speculation about the reasons for Don Juan's sexual overdrive.

The director's illuminating idea is to envisage the hotel symbolically, with its bustle of transients, as a limbo-like prison, from which the almost middle-aged Don Juan of Bartlett's imagining can no more escape than he can resist Eros's pull.

The exploitative encounter with the simple, smitten Charlotte and Mathurine, neatly transformed from peasant girls to hotel maids, gives way to eerie foreboding as misty darkness falls.

A lifelike statue gestures towards Don Juan, to the accompaniment of an extended musical chord: realism gives way to an envisioning of the hero's dark mental landscape. It is as if the statue was Don Juan's hallucination rather than agent of damnation whisking him Hellwards to thunderclap accompaniment.

Bartlett's staging reminds us of the play's ambiguities and the ambiguous responses it provokes. Juan comes to seem both a sexual/financial predator and a fearless, radical atheist who admits that sexual pleasure rather than faithfulness should guide our lives.

James Wilby, all lordly and languid in his grey suit or dinner jacket, plays Don Juan as a suave, serial fornicator who deceives and abuses, but does so with insufficient relish, enjoyment or cruelty. Here stands a maestro of outrage.

Yet, whether telling Felicity Dean's pained Dona Elvira cruel home-truths, confounding the money-lender Mr Sunday, or mockingly embracing the role of hypocrite in his reproachful father's presence, Wilby underplays Don Juan's wicked vitality, his revelling in malignity.