The Double Bass

Patrick Suskind is best known as the author of Perfume. His 1981 monologue, The Double Bass, shares similar themes, creating, in its portrait of a frustrated double bass player, a contained world of the senses shot through with a palpable sense of the protagonist as an outsider.

Over the course of 90 minutes, the musician's resentment over his creative shortcomings, arrested emotional life and wretched loneliness are gradually projected onto his double bass, which in turn becomes objectified as both a hollow piece of machinery and the woman who won't love him back.

Andy Serkis's set effectively encloses Bev Willis as the bass player in a small apartment-like space, with clean white lines that also recall a solitary confinement cell. Initially, the artist rhapsodises over the double bass, whose unavoidable stage

presence is a reminder of the claustrophobic extent to which it defines and confines his life; by the end he is raving, full of loathing for both it and himself.

Willis has a hard task finding every psychological nuance in his character, and his wired, excitable performance occasionally feels rushed. Yet this invigorating dramatisation catches the lack of sentiment and complex humour in S¸skind's semi-absurd portrait of the artist who wasn't quite.

Until Oct 11, Southwark Playhouse, 62 Southwark Bridge Road SE1, Mon to Sat 7.30pm, £10, £6 concs. Tel: 020 7620 3494. Tube: Borough