Through the Leaves

An onstage blowjob; an explicit bout of violent love-making; full frontal male nudity; even intimations of an over-randy dog. You might be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled accidentally into XXX, the Spanish sex show that's made headlines in London recently and features all of those things (and more).

Actually, it's the West End transfer of German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz's quietly compelling, slowly devastating one-act drama, Through the Leaves, seen first at the tiny Southwark Playhouse in January 2003 and now moved across the river to the larger, but still intimate, Duchess Theatre.

According to a programme note, Kroetz's plays give voice, paradoxically, to the inarticulate: "the most important 'action' of my characters," he is quoted as saying, "is their silence." And the silences that pass between his two characters here speak volumes about the chasm of barely understood emotions and their inability to translate their feelings into words.

Through the Leaves - in which a middle-aged female tripe butcher called Martha charts the halting progress of her relationship with Otto, a frustrated factory worker, through the pages of her diary - is a haunting elegy to loneliness and fading hopes. "Is a big romance still possible when you're past 50?" she enquires early on. "I wonder what the future holds, question mark" she writes in her diary later.

Ann Mitchell's resourceful and resonating performance perfectly conveys the isolation that Martha's independence has bought her, and her painful need for Otto's companionship that shows through her tough resilience. Simon Callow's Otto, meanwhile, also astutely captures the brashness of the man who recklessly and relentlessly hurts her but doesn't realise the damage he's doing to himself, either.

These are characters that are not easy to like in a play that's not always easy to enjoy. But Daniel Kramer's appropriately bleak production - with Soutra Gilmour's starkly effective setting stunningly lit by Charles Balfour - expertly catches its alternately fleeting and brooding changes of mood and menace.

- Mark Shenton