Tales without a sting

No play in 1930s Britain matched the scope or moral seriousness of Odon von Horvath's Tales from the Vienna Woods.

The dramas of this central European writer convey the social anxiety and financial upheaval heralding Hitler's dictatorship.

But von Horvath's now over-familiar kaleidoscope of romantic, sex-crazy Viennese in 1930, when Austria faced economic depression and looming poverty, needs a more direct, down-to-earth production than given here. The arty ponderousness of Richard Jones's staging keeps focusing attention more on manner than theatrical matter.

The epic scale of the satirical comedy, in David Harrower's deftly pitched new version, makes big demands. Its 14 scenes and 30 petit-bourgeois characters
range around Vienna's woods, nearby countryside, streets and taverns.

And suddenly the stage becomes a nightclub, where half-naked dancing girls send men wildish. The conventional, cautionary narrative, though, is essentially intimate.

It describes a failed dash for freedom by Marianne, the poor little toyshop girl. Abandoning her butcher-fiance Oskar (Darrell D'Silva) for the caddish Alfred, she is spurned by father and new lover, and reduced to nude dancing before falling into Oskar's forgiving arms.

In his 1977 National Theatre production, Maximilian Schell neatly confined the action within a revolving set. This device helped emphasise the play's circularity: it begins with Alfred at his mother's home and ends there after his infant son, offspring from his liaison with Nicola Walker's smitten Marianne, dies in suspicious circumstances.

By contrast Nicky Gillibrand's small-scale, cumbersome Brechtian set, swamped in the Olivier's large spaces, is sensitive to neither place nor atmosphere. The design consists of two blank postcards blown up to the size of walls, and on which are imprinted montage pictures of toyshop, butcher's and tobacconist's.

Seven musicians, dressed in typically Austrian hats and short trousers, keep appearing in fancy formations to play, or rather overplay, those Johann Strauss waltzes, whose saccharine romanticism runs in contrast to tough Viennese reality.

Walker's elegant Marianne is far too cool and collected to register the girl's impetuous sexuality or her growing desperation. It is Frances Barber as the middle-aged, man-hungry tobacconist who forcefully turns up the emotional temperature. Although Joe Duttine's Alfred needs more erotic energy and Karl Johnson burlesques Marianne's hypocritical, randy father, most performances are finely keyed to this comedy of lost illusions.

Until 19 November. Information: 020 7452 3000.

Tales From The Vienna Woods