Vassily Sigarev's latest black comedy from the ailing heart of contemporary Russia delivers another sad indictment of a country possessed by poverty, corruption and social break-down.
It is the second play he has sent us since his remarkable debut with Plasticine in 2002, and though his comic voice remains strange and fresh, Sigarev strikes social and comedic notes he has already sounded.
Ladybird also lacks the panoramic vigour and range of his Black Milk or the novelty, dramatic tension and psychological astuteness of Plasticine. This writer's big reputation will begin to suffer repetitive strain injury if he does not begin to vary and extend himself as a dramatist.
A hundred years ago, in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Trofimov condemned a Russia in which the workers slept "30 to 40 to a room, with bed-bugs everywhere, to say nothing of the stench, the damp, the moral degradation."
Ladybird, set in a dilapidated tenement near a cemetery in some nameless town suggests that the great political and ideological convulsions since the Cherry Orchard was written have left the under-classes in scarcely better a state. Lizzie Clachlan's terrific stage design, with its towering mountain of earth and rubbish outside the building and its open vista of a dirty, decaying room, sets the grimmish scene.
Nineteen-year-old Dima (Daniel Mays), all set to join the army and fight in Chechnya, stages a goodbye party whose druggy, dreaming sexual and bartering aspects combine to display impoverished Russian youth in their despairing,
aimless variety. Burn Gorman's impressive Slavik slumbers then slumps around in a heroin haze, while Christine Bottomley's comically intriguing neighbourhood tart, Lera, is possessed by the fantasy that she is poised to win 1,000 roubles and a new life.
Her hopeless, hopeful wooing of Jason Done's canny wide-boy who illicitly trades in grave-markers reveals the play's fine comic-pathetic strain at its enjoyable best. But Dima's subjection to a suddenly sadistic Yulka (Anna Madeley) and a romantic-sentimental finale ring untrue in Ramin Gray's otherwise well-tuned production.
Until 27 March. Information: 020 7565 5000.
Ladybird
