Not such a Gem of a play

No modern dramatist, Eugene O'Neill apart, attempted anything as epic in scale as August Wilson's historic 10-play cycle that traces the evolution of 20th-century black Americans from the humiliation of being branded as "property" to the status of acceptance as "people."

It is sad, therefore, that the cycle's penultimate work, the laboriously long-winded Gem of the Ocean, premiered in Chicago just two years ago, should rouse such great expectations and fulfil none of them in this powerfully acted production by Paulette Randall.

Suffused with the pretensions of religious symbolism, touched by magic realism, invigorated with regular puffs of comic spirit and flurries of pathos, while staggering under the weight of several plot-lines, this depressing parable offers spiritual exorcism and martrydom as a way out for a desperate young black.

Set in 1904, in the Hill district of Pittsburgh where Wilson himself was born, Gem of the Ocean provides a verbal rather than visual impression of a black society menaced by oppression, extreme poverty and injustice.

Libby Watson's design for a parlour, with peeling walls, broken windows and half-constructed ceiling, reeks of chronic deprivation. This is home to the nearly 300-year-old former slave, Carmen Munroe's imposing Aunt Ester, a woman basking in the smug serenity of the religious know-all, her handsome servant Black Mary and middle-aged Eli.

The suicide of a black man accused of stealing a bucket of nails from a local mill becomes Ester's concern when young Citizen Barlow arrives to see her. Enthrallingly played by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, in spasms of guilt and terror, Barlow reveals himself as the actual thief.

His expiation is undertaken by Ester, Mary, Eli and Joseph Marcell's endearing Solly in a sea-voyage ritual that is weirdly akin to a matching ceremony in TS Eliot's The Cocktail Party.

When the mill subsequently goes up in flames, Patrick Robinson's menacing Sheriff, who is also Mary's brother and ironically ill-disposed to his own race, arrives in search of the guilty man.

Wilson is less concerned with dramatising the black struggle for freedom from barbaric whites still hankering for slavery than demonstrating how this socety makes criminals of desperate men, casting them in spiritual or literal chains.

Until 11 February. Information 020 7328 1000.

Gem Of The Ocean