"If you sing a song about Atlanta, you got to have been to Atlanta," says an old blues folk hero in Stephen Jeffreys's new play; and it is a line that acquires ever greater irony as the evening progresses.
For Jeffreys, a white British writer, here attempts to get to the heart of the black American experience; and the result, while theatrically skilful, often feels like a piece of artful impersonation.
Jeffreys's technique is to apply the Faust myth to the American south. The time is 1975, the setting is an obscure house in the Mississippi Delta. Its occupants are Jesse, a onetime blues legend, who has long been assumed dead, and his fugitive daughter Della.
Their precarious peace is shattered by the arrival of Karl, a Surrey-based rock star whose band has been doing a gig in Memphis, Tennessee. Karl's mission is to woo the septuagenarian Jesse, whom he idolises, back into the limelight for one last stand.
As a practised dramatist, Jeffreys understands the importance of desperation and he shrewdly parcels it out among his three characters.
The pious Jesse, who after the death of his wife forsook the blues as the devil's music, is lured by the adrenaline buzz of live performance. Against that he has to balance Della's need for anonymity after her involvement with the Black Panthers.
Even the Mephistophelian Karl, facing the break-up of his band, is torn between drug-dependence or a new partnership with a renascent Jesse.
Jeffreys draws you into his story, deals his cards cleverly and even, boldly, gives Karl a chance to display his talents as a blues guitarist. But the play also raises disturbing questions about authenticity.
Jesse eloquently argues that, unless you have known what it is to be black, poor and deprived, singing the blues is an adoptive attitude. By the same token, it seems to me difficult for a white writer to inhabit the soul of a blues legend or a black militant of the 1970s. At times, you feel you are watching a skilled pastiche of a play by August Wilson rather than a recreation of lived experience.
What carries the play through is the quality of the performance under the guidance of Richard Wilson - one of the best directors of actors in captivity. Tommy Hollis as the aged Jesse brings out beautifully the man's mixture of reclusive piety and closet vanity: when he dons his old fedora, you see him acquiring a recollected swagger. Ciaran McMenamin as the rock star with a touch of Surrey on top also has exactly the right cool sexiness and implacable selfishness. And, in the trickiest role, Sophie Okonedo makes you believe that Della is bursting with deadly secrets.
It is a cleverly plotted, extremely well-researched play; all it lacks is the hectic, bluesy, volatile veracity that a black writer might have brought to the same theme.
• Until January 6. Box office: 020-7565 5000. This review appeared in later editions yesterday.
