The President's Holiday - TNT

Drawing on material from the diaries of Raisa Gorbachev, Penny Gold's clumsily pedestrian new play attempts to draws parallels between the short-lived coup in August 1991 during which Mikhail Gorbachev was temporarily deposed and the fate (decades earlier) of the last Russian Tsar. As the president prepares to leave his Crimean holiday home and return to Moscow to sign the controversial Union Treaty, he and his family find themselves held incommunicado whilst a state of emergency is declared.There's the potential for a taut drama here, but neither the uninspired sketching in of the political background nor the superficial portrayal of the Gorbachevs at a time of crisis generates much interest. The various comings and goings within the dacha have little internal logic — and even less credibility — and even his daughter's collapse at the end of the first act proves a damp dramatic squib. Though real life husband and wife Julian Glover and Isla Blair evince appropriate degrees of ( respectively) irate political impotence and wifely concern, this is an unconvincing and tedious work which runs out of steam faster than the historic event which inspired it, but has none of its long-lasting resonance. Hampstead, Eton Ave, NW3 (020-7722 9301) Until February 16. £22-£13