Pedantry and pranks

The politicians who redrew the map of the globe following the First World War notoriously sowed seeds for so many conflicts, it is astounding that their pens did not explode in anticipation of the bloodshed they would cause.

The expression, "The past is a different country" was not coined until 1952, but Trevor Baxter aims to investigate a time when its meaning was possibly most powerful - three and a half decades beforehand - in a new play that reveals the dangerous playfulness behind the pinstriped-existences of four English civil servants.

Guy Retallack's sharply disciplined production and Pleasance artistic director Christopher Richardson's intensely atmospheric wooden-panelled design put an impressive veneer on a script that has interesting aims but fights shy of its subject matter's full potential.

Baxter's point - that politically vital statistics and information could be mucked around by bored civil servants more interested in their personal lives and prejudices than in epoch-shattering decisions - unfortunately simply leads to yet another play examining how the stiff British upper lip was frequently twinned with inadequacy in the underpants area.

So while Lloyd George's interests in Greece and Britain's contemporarily relevant designs on the Ottoman Empire provide the backdrop to Office Games, the audience is invited to focus on the adulterous intentions of Richard O'Callaghan's Charles Raven, the puritanical Christianity of Adam Rickitt's Wilkes, the paedophiliac interests of Mel Raido's Brian Cooke and Adam Croasdell's portrayal of Jervis pursuing a vendetta against his boss.

Why is this all necessary, you ask, despite excellent performances, especially from Raido and Croasdell, who embody both the small-minded and the sinister in their brutally boyish bullying of the unhappily virginal Wilkes. Without much more political detail, little significant spice can be gained from this essentially run-of-the-mill portrayal of pedantry and prank-playing in bureaucratic Georgian England.

Until 25 May. Box office: 020 7609 1800.

Office Games