Quality will out at King's Head

This exciting American import by George Rattner, which focuses on the dilemma of an elderly Hasidic Jew facing a crisis of faith and survival, coincides with the news that the King's Head is again facing a crisis of its own. The London Boroughs Grants Committee has just withdrawn its annual award of £35,000, partially because it claims this theatre is not in the vanguard where gay plays are concerned.

Yet the King's Head's record as a producer of gay plays is most impressive - far more so than, say, that of the Royal Shakespeare Company or Hampstead Theatre. Its productions of Burning Blue (about the witch-hunting of gays in the military), My Night With Claud, Elegies For Angels (a memorial to the AIDS dead), the still relevant revival of Boys In The Band and a show about Kenneth Williams all deservedly reached the West End.

Anyway why are a load of councillors awarding grants on the basis of genre rather than quality?. The King's Head is cherished and must be saved because of the versatile quirkiness of its wide repertoire. George Rattner's Of Blessed Memory is typically King's Head in its unusualness. Set within a Brooklyn paint shop (vividly evoked by designer Nigel Hook) it stages a fascinating clash of loyalties. When Aaron Greenwald, a Hasidic Jewish shopowner, realises the renewal of his lease from a Puerto Rican gangster would involve him in criminality, he's faced with a hard ethical question.

Should he criminally collude, thinking only of his own survival and role in his separatist Hasidic sect? Or does he owe allegiance to the world beyond and to his Puerto Rican assistant who wants the gangster shopped to the police? Despite irritating black-outs between scenes, which interrupt the flow of this tense, taut conflict, Gordon Greenberg's production engrosses. The characterisation is sometimes flimsily stereotyped and the denouement sentimental, but Rattner provocatively reveals New York as a city of immigrant outsiders, all immersed in their own closed worlds - Hasidic Jewish, Puerto Rican and Cuban. George Layton's fraught Aaron, Owen Oakeshott as his Puerto Rican assistant, Michelle Gomez as a moll with heart and especially Mario Kalli's gangster with a killing air about him keep you rapt.

Save King's Head Gala, starring Victoria Wood, Drury Lane Theatre, 22 March, 8.00pm (0171-494 5061).

Of Blessed Memory