It is never a promising dramatic omen when a set overwhelms everybody and everything to become the main character.
Yet if a production invites leading Brit Art name Tracey Emin, doyenne of the unmade bed, to see to its design, it has to be prepared for the actors and even the play itself to slide vertiginously down the pecking order.
So it came to pass that an enfant terrible tackled Les Parents Terribles. Thus this dishevelled, would-be incestuous bourgeois household unravels in front of a backcloth, adorned with a crescent moon and star and a cross, that reads: "Meet me in heaven ) I'll waite [sic] for you."
Has director Timothy Ackroyd uncovered some hitherto unsuspected Middle Eastern overtones in Cocteau's 1938 black comedy? No, he has simply got his cart and horse in a terrible prioritisation muddle in the quest for a little extra publicity.
Everything else that Emin has contributed is unremarkably - and suitably - respectable, which makes that tapestry appear more and more peculiar as the farcical-tragic events centring on Michael and his Jocasta complex-ridden mother Yvonne unfold.
It was as this love-struck young man in the National's production of more than a decade ago that the young Jude Law first came to prominence, but here Rocky Mazzilli struggles to imbue his lines with any sign of truly felt emotion.
The fact that his accent is decidedly French, whereas the other cast members speak rigid Received Pronunciation, is also no help.
Mazzilli is not the only one floundering in his Voyage-designed costume, however. The overall tone falls terribly flat and what should be a sparklingly amoral work becomes Ray Cooney-like in its amorous machinations and frantic revelations.
Rachel Edwards strikes a refreshingly pure note as Michael's girlfriend Madeleine, but the tapestry has the evening all sewn up long before this.
Until May 22. Information: 020 7287 2875.
Les Parents Terribles
