Sher's writing debut

There is a stinging, though veiled topicality about I.D., the first play written by Antony Sher. It is a disappointing assassination drama, with Sir Antony giving an old-fashioned, look-atme performance as a maddish Communist murderer, hounded out of several countries.

The subject apparently at stake in Sher's play - Demetrios Tsafendas's 1966 killing of South Africa's apartheid prime minister, Henry Verwoerd - seems remote from the preoccupations of not-so-cool Britannia, 2003. We never contemplated South Africa's wicked, segregationist ploys. Yet the problem of the refugee in search of a country links Demetrios in 1966 to Britain with its nagging immigrant problem today.

And I.D. could have usefully made far more of these similarities. Sir Antony presents Demetrios as a benign life-victim, whom, as a government messenger, we observe stabbing Dr Verwoerd. And TV soap star Alex Ferns takes the play's riskiest role of Lintwurm. Ferns is required to humanises the giant tapeworm which Tsafendas imagined was trapped inside him and had goaded him to murder. This Lintwurm is of course Demetrios's raging alter ego, to whom a shavenheaded Ferns, in wet-look chocolate shirt and goggles, lends an air of jovial vituperation.

The 40 scenes of Sher's script - played upon a bareish makeshift stage with the cast sitting on the sidelines when not required - keeps shuffling between the Sixties and the Nineties. But Nancy Meckler, a brilliantly inventive and creative director when working with her Shared Experience company, does not offer a vivid, developing impression of Demetrios's rootless shifting life any more than Sher's script does. Only the assassination scene achieves a real theatrical charge.

The significant point about Tsafendas, though Sher skirts the matter, is his status as a contemporary phenomenon - a refugee, who becomes an international exile and aspiring immigrant, never achieving the real I.D. of the title.

As a half-cast, born to a mulatto mother and Cretan father, Demetrios did not belong. So he suffered, as Jon Cartwright's Gavronsky the chief government psychiatrist puts it, "a lifetime of almost unimaginable isolation and dislocation, kicked from one country to another".

From this life we must take a stark message. Victims of ethnic, racist and religious persecution, eternal immigrants and outcasts, may become the terrorists and murderers we fear today. But was it anti-apartheid idealism or mania that inspired Demetrios to murder? I.D. does not provide sufficient evidence either way.

Sher relates Verwoerd to Tsafendas on the grounds that both men were obsessed by identity. But Marius Weyer's chillingly serene, mild-mannered prime minister has long since perfected apartheid and serves no crucial function. If only Sher had dramatised scenes from Demetrios's childhood and maturity, showing how the half-cast became such an angry, mentally disturbed man. The future murderer is nearly 50 when the play properly begins.

And his 30-plus years of terrible imprisonment are cursorily represented by life in an upright box. Eager to be classified as black so he can settle down with Cleo Sylvestre's endearingly prim Cape coloured spinster, Demetrios wrestles with inflexible authority in South Africa and London and becomes a strange tragi-comic figure.

A crophaired Sir Antony takes to suffering with indecent relish, voice slurred and over-pitched, arms gesticulating. The performance reeks of artificiality and Sher's symbiotic connection with Ferns's Lintwurm is oddly cool. I.D. lacks a strong sense of its own role.

I. D.