Mirrors of madness

What a strange, strong spell the octogenarian director Franco Zeffirelli can still cast upon a production. As soon as the lights go up on the extraordinary set Zeffirelli himself has designed, we seem under the sway of a master-magician.

A wilderness of wall-to-wall mirrors make the stage, with its coloured mosaic back-cloth and gilt framework, into a dizzying, optical illusion of extended width and height. This is no realistic, bourgeois living room as the playwright specified, but a handsome, towering architectural edifice. It is a labyrinth, the significance of which later becomes apparent.

Zeffirelli has taken a neglected parable drama by that revolutionary master builder of 20th century drama, Luigi Pirandello, and made it resound with riveting contemporaneity. The play, in Martin Sherman's fresh, witty version, demonstrates that truth is relative, elusive and dependent upon individual perception.

The dividing lines between reality and illusion, Pirandello implies, are for ever blurred, with madness a device to ward off problems of identity. Curiosity, a governing drive of our own celebrity-obsessed culture, similarly dominates Absolutely! (perhaps).

Councillor Agazzi, his wife and daughter, not to mention assorted neighbours, are all agog to solve the mystery engulfing three new arrivals in town. Joan Plowright's melancholic Signora Frola admits she is barred from close contact with her daughter, married to distraught Signor Pronza, because this emotionally disturbed soninlaw claims his wife's exclusive attention. But Pronza insists that Frola suffers from madness, precipitated by the death of her daughter, to whom he was married, and that he now lives with a second wife.

Each fresh twist or revelation leaves the truth less fathomable, with the Councillor's family and prurient town's folk mystified about where the truth lies. The setting, with its trompe l'oeil illusions, literally and figuratively mirrors this sense of confusion.

As a text Absolutely! (perhaps) seems endlessly illustrative of the impossibility of truth finding. But under Zeffirelli's magic, transforming control, the play advances further, poignantly dramatising the essential mystery, secrecy and strangeness of human relations.

Oliver Ford Davies ridiculously plays the sole, truly perceptive character with sufficient bellowing to enflame a Victorian melodrama. Barry Stanton's Agazzi succumbs to the same mode, while Liza Tarbuck as his wife remains ostentatiously wooden. Yet Miss Plowright's wonderfully enigmatic Frola, serene, desolate and placating, and Darrell D'Silva's naggingly distraught Ponza invest this Pirandello with thrilling emotional and dramatic velocity.

Until 23 August. Box office: 020 7369 1736.

"Absolutely! (perhaps)"