Tailored for the East

Here he collaborates with designer Ultz to show simultaneously the brightly coloured layout of Hobson's tailoring shop, his kitchen and the sewing workshop below, so that when the bickering, the flutteringeyelashed seductions and the plotting take place, it feels as if the audience is gazing at a building with its wall sliced off.

That sense that we are all viewing, Big Brother-style but without cameras, intensifies when the audience is taken across the road from the Young Vic to a hall for the wedding of Hobson's eldest daughter, Durga.

Evidently, Yasmin Wilde's excellent Durga not only sells but wears the trousers - whether taking inside leg measurements with dominatrix confidence, or fighting off her future husband's fiancée with the confidence of a slightly love-sick rottweiler - and the play gains its central strength and pathos from watching her try to transform Ali, her weakling spouse, into the kind of man who will dominate her, prefeministstyle.

In this warmly enjoyable, slyly provocative evening Richard Sumitro (Ali) shines as the man who grows from weed to woman-tamer. Paul Bhattacharjee's cantankerous Hobson also puts in an admirably despicable performance as the bigoted blight of modern aspirations and of his daughters' lives.

Until 9 August. Box office: 020 7928 6363.

Hobson's Choice