Too long in the tooth

Judging by David Lan's flashy, traverse-stage production, time has mightily damaged and diminished this comic-strip history of mankind by Thornton Wilder.

Its original idea is to track back millions of years while retaining the framework and manners of a humble, 1930s New Jersey suburb: Indira Varma's sharp, sexy maid flutters around with a feather-duster, while the Ice Age looms and a dinosaur and mammoth come in from the cold.

The Antrobus family, headed by Maureen Beattie's long-suffering wife and David Troughton's strident paterfamilias, who has invented the wheel and the alphabet, play host to shivering strangers. Jonas Armstrong as their Cain-like son injects some late passion into the unamusing atmosphere.

Wilder encapsulates civilisation's history in three episodes of catastrophe - this Ice Age, the Flood and A War - from which humanity narrowly emerges unscathed to begin again. Crisis, Wilder uninspiringly demonstrates, is the human lot.

This cyclical comedy is said to have been inspired by James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and influenced by Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, not that Wilder, always the most accessible of playwrights, echoes the strenuous intellectualism of either writer.

Indeed, the New York reviewer of the 1942 American premiere who admiringly described the play as "a cosmic variety show" suggests why The Skin of Our Teeth fails now. Its comic bite has become mere toothless munching.

Lan's production, complete with music and Pirandellian interludes when actors discard their roles and speak as themselves, is far too sold on spectacle and scenic effects. The interminable, unfunny second act where Troughton's Antrobus becomes President of the Ancient Order of Mammals, subdivision Humans, is a case in point. The Flood comes as a real relief.

Until 10 April. Information: 020 7928 6363.

The Skin Of Our Teeth