Strange play is visual treat

Paul Hunter's weird piece of theatre about the 20th century French surrealist, novelist and playwright Boris Vian is an amusing if inconsequential frivolity. It runs scared of that plodding genre, the biographic drama. So seekers after facts and theories in relation to Vian will find this Told by an Idiot theatre company production lavishly disappointing. There is scant information about the man, no dramatising or literary assessing of his place in French literature. Instead Hunter's own deftly drilled production allures us with lovely visual jokes, with recollected snatches and flashes of Vian's life.

These incidents are recalled to mind by the 39-year-old writer as he dies from a heart attack caused by his outrage over a film adaptation of his book I Spit on Your Graves.

Hunter's I'm a Fool to Want You, which switches with all the odd smoothness of a dream from vignettes of Vian's real life to scenes from his film, becomes an elegy to an unexpected love-match. A mood of jocular strangeness, bordering on the surreal, is at once established.

The bare stage boasts a back wall, from whose three exits characters keep popping, and onto which three chairs and a pair of red shoes are horizontally stuck. This design, Zoe Rahman's jazzy piano music and Mark Crown's trumpet improvisations all help shape the dream-struck, improvisatory atmosphere in which Stephen Harper's dark-suited, moustachioed, dead-pan Boris falls for his barber Ursula. Seductive Hayley Carmichael invests this latter role with her familiar mix of husky-voiced, waif-like exuberance and childish glee.

The show, with its mimicry of the dashing style of a silent film, relies upon the quirky acrobatic vigour of the lovers whose limbs become entwined and clothes abandoned as they virtually dance while recumbent. Harper's stolid Boris, smitten by Miles Davis's jazz, may look French but vocally he sounds about as Gallic as Yorkshire pudding. Nevertheless, whether wittily tranformed into his infantile self or suffering fatal heart pangs, Harper retains the look of someone eternally bemused by life.

Until 22 February. BAC, SW11. Information: 020 7223 2223.