Stockbroker belted

Whose play is it anyway? While savouring the leaps and slides, the unconscious desirings and discoverings of Katie Mitchell's extraordinary dreamscape of a production, you might judge this an imaginative response to August Strindberg's original text rather than a faithful rendition of it.

The programme credits Caryl Churchill with this version. She cut and edited the text, tightened the dialogue. Katie Mitchell and her cast went further. They convincingly supplied new material, excised sections, created fresh characters, a different focus and context. Miss Churchill appears happy about these developments, though she asked it be made clear this Dream Play production is not based on her Strindberg adaptation.

No matter. The original - radical in its dream-struck form, but banal in its demonstration of life's difficulties - acquires a fascinating new lease of life thanks to Miss Mitchell's radical surgery. The play no longer focuses upon Lucy Whybrow's Agnes, "daughter of the Gods", making her earthly visit. Instead the dreaming is refracted through the anguished mind of stockbroker Alfred whose life experiences are akin to Strindberg's own.

Angus Wright portrays him superbly as a gaunt, tormented victim - often stripped down to the embarrassment of underpants. He becomes a humiliated outsider and bemused spectator at life's feast.

The setting is 1950s England, when sex, marriage and divorce still caused social frissons of the sort Strindberg understood. Vicki Mortimer's design relies upon a mobile, glassed-door partition. Alfred begins realistically in his office and then casts dreamwards when Agnes offers him freedom.

Revenants are deftly summoned. Childhood, with Anastasia Hille's mother-figure back from the dead, beckons. The air hums with sounds and voices. Alfred cannot pass through the stage-door to meet his love, though his rivals have easy entrance. The broker is assailed by infant corpses hanging in cupboards, by winged angels, and ballet dancers swaying in tutus, with whom he awkwardly tries to perform.

Miss Mitchell's beautifully articulated images and actions pass in a seamless flow of surprises and atmospherics. Chris Davey's shafts of lighting and music from Giselle to Bach engulf the stage.

In a defining scene, Alfred suffers a schoolmaster's contempt. "I'm a big boy. I've got a knighthood. I'm a stockbroker," he pleads. In this assertion of status and betrayal of insecurity Mitchell's amazing evocation catches Strindberg's ghostly essence.

Booking to 29 March. Information: 020 7452 3000.

A Dream Play