Something fishy in EU

Tim Luscombe, best known for his gayish play Eurovision, has taken a wild, brave leap into the complexities of European Union politics during this past half-century. Unfortunately, with The Schuman Plan he and his drama fall flat.

By claiming that EU officials condone the false claims of Italian farmers for millions of euros, while Britain's fishermen are financially ruined by honest civil servants administering Euro rules, Luscombe succumbs to the sweeping Europhobia he condemns. It takes far more than this microcosmic example to muster macrocosmic conviction.

Luscombe's socio-political epic, though, does serve as a useful reminder of how Hampstead's director, Anthony Clark, is ambitiously trying to revitalise this theatre by producing plays that break away from domestic family dramas and reach into contemporary history and unfamiliar terrain.

This drama, which spans three countries and makes repeated visits to Whitehall and Suffolk, darts backwards and forwards through seven decades, with five actors playing 18 roles in 11 scenes.

In Clark's fluent, finely acted production the busy shifts of location and character emphasise rather than disguise Luscombe's loquacity, his contrivances and confused intentions.

Too often debate and disagreement is stalled. Luscombe's perspective on Europe is conveyed through the experiences of Robert Hands's Bill Bretherton, an earnest, love-lorn civil servant and Suffolk fisherman's son, who unbelievably sits in on history while it is being made. In the process, Bretherton loses faith in the European dream.

As a Europhiliac clerical officer he sits next to Sean Baker's irascible Clement Attlee, who scorns Jean Monnet's advocacy of the Schuman plan for a European Coal and Steel community. As private secretary to Simon Robson's amusing, plummily narcissistic Edward Heath, he witnesses, in the play's one real dramatic tussle, how British fishermen are betrayed to secure our entry into Europe.

It beggars belief, though, that Bretherton, realising British fishermen will be ruined, should then go off to Brussels to administer the Common Agricultural Policy, subsequently returning home to harry the persecuted Suffolk fishermen as an official of the Department of Agriculture. The Schuman Plan lacks the smack of firm conviction.

Until 25 February. Information: 020 7722 9301.

The Schuman Plan