Power paranoia

It is difficult to know which is dirtier - sex or money - in this portrait of a kingdom where virtue is unfashionable, and excess has become an elaborate art form.

Amid the men in dresses, the sex in perfectly cultivated gardens, the suggestive fingering of accounts, and the colourful obscenities, Nick Dear's depiction of the relationship between finance and leadership in the French court of Louis XIV is infinitely more entertaining than similar struggles in the world of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.

Robert Lindsay is in his element as the urbane Nicolas Fouquet, a wealthy courtier who drips affectation from every pore, and is as easily excited by a sumptuously ornate garden design as by the flesh of a young virgin. A leading intellect, aesthete and financial genius, one minute he is raving that he owns a cornucopia of art works and thinkers, while the next he is explaining his thirst for more power by asking: "Why does a buck rabbit, having fathered a thousand bunnies, still want to f*** anything with floppy ears?"

Dear most recently adapted Gorky's Summerfolk for the National Theatre, but his latest drama, combining intelligent political analysis and spicy personal detail, is reminiscent of his ribald play about the painter Hogarth, The Art of Success (1986). When Dear's Hogarth play transferred to New York, the then New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich praised its biting relevance to the modern art scene - so it is perhaps unsurprising that Power's themes of branding, dodgy financial donations and leadership struggles bear more than a whiff of today's British politics.

If there is equally an interior logic to this historically closely researched piece where the king's younger brother, Philippe (a wonderfully affected Jonathan Slinger), has been encouraged by his mother to disclaim power by dressing as a girl, and the king's sister-in-law Henriette (Geraldine Somerville as Charles I's daughter) is a constant reminder that regal necks should always fear the guillotine. In this fetid atmosphere of monarchic paranoia, the young Louis XIV admires Fouquet's sexual worldliness and stylish wit, until the latter's Vaux-le-Vicomte villa - the precursor of Versailles - makes the the king feel erectionally-challenged.

Power works best when it is trying least hard, for despite Dear's ingenious humour, there are instants - such as the opening, or the scenes between Rupert Penry-Jones's King Louis and his lover Henriette - when the script could have been ambushed by an earnest theorist, or by a Carry On scriptwriter-It is Stephen Boxer's clerkish courtier Colbert, the Gordon Brown-style genius who rigs Fouquet's downfall, or Barbara Jefford's gorgon-like Queen Mother who stir up the most fascinating themes, as they carve political order from a world of illusion.

The obsession with the politics of display would seem to make this a perfect production for the larger stages of the Olivier or Lyttelton. Yet director Lindsay Posner's skilful co-ordination of lighting and sound-effects means a seduction scene or a feast for 6,000 can be conjured up in seconds, while flamboyant costumes make the men the prettiest social butterflies in town.

Lindsay is most enjoyable when he transforms from dilettantish flirt to gritty power-broker in seconds. It is unfortunate for his character that in Louis XIV's eyes, it is not just imitation but imprisonment which is the sincerest form of flattery.

Power