Strangeness in the night

William Gaskill, that avant-garde, Brechtian director who ran the Royal Court in the 1960s and abandoned the professional theatre years ago to teach at Rada, has made a triumphant come-back at the age of 75.

His dramatisation and direction of five short stories by that American master, Raymond Carver, makes an oddly fascinating and unusual night out. The performances are all top notch.

In his hey-day, Gaskill's productions were remarkable for their lucid directness, their stripping away of distracting theatrical clutter and atmospherics.

They told a clear story. That is the Brechtian way. These characteristics serve him and us mighty well in his skilful adaptations of Carver, whose prose and characters usually maintain an air of meditative cool and laconic humour.

The five stories Gaskill has dramatised and vigilantly directed, with the audience arranged in semi-circular formation, achieve domestic and stylistic unity.

They are all variations on the theme of marriages in trouble or disarray, though the trouble tends to loiter discreetly on the periphery, while food, cannabis and drink, hard or soft, are lavishly enjoyed.

The value in staging Carver has strangely to do with the very thing from which both Carver and Gaskill recoil. The stories are theatrical, though in an uncharacteristic way.

Apart from observing and quietly enjoying the comedy of social embarrassment, alienation and unvoiced marital dissatisfaction, Carver discovers mystery in the heart of the domestic everyday. Strangeness creeps up on the action like a stealthy mugger. You are left scratching your head and mind.

In Cathedral, Bruce Alexander's stoned husband has a moment of ephiphanic revelation when he closes his eyes and begins to draw pictures with Jack Claff 's sonorous, widowed, blind visitor, for whom his wife (Rosemary McHale) has nursed a strange, year-long tendresse.

A similar transference occurs when a young waitress feels a passionate sympathy for Andrew Buckley's corpulent eater in Fat. Even in Put Yourself in My Shoes, Bruce Alexander's amusing displays of social rudeness mask an ulterior purpose. Gaskill unerringly catches Carver's elusive melancholia and his bone-dry comedy.

Until 6 August. Information: 0207 503 1646.

Carver (What's In Alaska?/Fat/Cathedral/Intimacy/Put Yourself In My Shoes)