A quiet revolution is taking place at the New Ambassadors, where Sonia Friedman is subtly altering the landscape of the West End and giving house room to some productions that would not usually cut it in London's commercial theatre.
Her canny programme mix sometimes throws up some interesting juxtapositions. Currently, at 7.30pm you can see the much-hyped The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler's dramatic solo based on the interviews she did with hundreds of women about their relationship with their vaginas; and at 9.30pm you can see Thembi Mtshali's one-woman autobiographical show about her life in apartheid South Africa. Even men will be able to tell which woman is faking it.
Mtshali's show is as much testimony as theatre. What we applaud is the woman as much as the performance, the fact - as she herself acknowledges - that she is there at all. Born in 1949, Mtshali tells a story that becomes the life story of all black South African women of her generation: women of astonishing patience, endurance and resilience who waited for their parents - working far away in South African cities - to visit them, waited to see their own children and waited for freedom.
She tells her tale with a moving dignity and unaffected simplicity, interspersed with infectious comic glee. There is almost no artifice, although running through the evening is the image of a fragile doll, of the kind made by poor black children who had nothing else to play with. These dolls are a symbol of the experience of black women under apartheid, who must learn to do without and look after white women's children while their own are brought up by grandparents far away. Most of all, the doll stands for all the black children of Soweto and elsewhere in South Africa who never came home and whose mothers are still waiting for them.
This is not a sophisticated evening or a theatrically radical one. It works because of its transparent honesty and because some stories just have to be told and must never be forgotten. This is one of them.
• Until June 30. Box office: 020-7369 1761.
