Miracle ** TNT

Monday 18 January 2010 10:51 GMT

According to the programme, Reza De Wet has won more major South African theatre and literary awards than any other writer, including Athol Fugard. Unfortunately, on the evidence of this revival of her 1992 play Mirakel, I’m at a loss to understand why.

Leicester Square might seem an unlikely location for a play set in a crypt, but Ruby in the Dust’s production, transferred to this tiny subterranean space, does a decent job of recreating the chill, unwelcoming atmosphere which greets a troupe of down at heel travelling players during the Great Depression of 1936 as they prepare to stage the medieval allegory Everyman.

Arriving back in the small town which is still home to male ingénue Abel’s wife, Anna, it depicts a life of hardship and lost dreams, one in which the past is never shaken off. Susannah York’s faded Salome hankers after past glories, cherishing the ancient picture which is displayed to announce the company’s arrival.

Bombastic actor manager Du Pre (Tim Woodward) attempts, futilely, to hide his growing frailty and the advancing years, whilst musician Antoine is generally dissatisfied with his lot and Lenie is expecting Abel’s child. But none of them can give up their peripatetic existence.

Only the deserted, considerably older Anna (Lynne Miller) thrives. Ostentatiously wealthy, dressed like death in head to toe black, she brings food and the offer of hospitality. But there is a price to pay for her apparent largesse.

The piece says something about the cost of pursuing one’s dreams and looking for a better way to live, but the dialogue and the characters are clichéd and, disappointingly, there is little sense of “the presence of the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary” that the playwright purports to depict.

Leicester Square Theatre, Basement, Leicester Place, WC2H 7BX (0844 847 2475), £20 to 24th January