Fine play falls victim to crazy surrealism

She has just met a famous writer at a railway station and she can't dismiss him from her thoughts. He's been in prison and been tortured. They become friends and have an affair.

Meanwhile, her husband loses his job and gets a job working in a supermarket.

A neighbour complains about the noise that their two children make in the garden and gives a vivid account of the war going on in Iraq.

Crimp prefaces his play, in the published text, with a quote from Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. "Everything we do, in art and life, is the imperfect copy of what we intended." The neighbour complains that everything that she does is awkward and artificial.

Early on, the husband asks his wife, who is a translator, if she has ever been tempted to write something of her own. 

The city turns out to be a city in the wife's mind. It should be an inexhaustible source of characters and stories, but it isn't.

She finds that she has to invent the characters, but they fail to come to life and her storylines never develop. She realises that she's not a natural writer. She's a translator.

Crimp is a translator, too. He's had more success with his adaptations than with his own work, although The National Theatre should revive his hilarious 1996 update of Moliere's Le Misanthrope.

Katie Mitchell directs Benedict Cumberbatch and Hattie Morahan within a minimalist setting. The actors are always interesting, but the play, which begins so promisingly, gets more and more surreal and less and less satisfying as it goes on.

The basic problem with The City is that it is impossible to understand what is going on while you are actually watching it. 

Plays until June 7. Box office: (020) 7565-5000.

ROBERT TANITCH