The other day I found a library copy of Nell Dunn’s Poor Cow in my cellar and, to my horror, realised that I should have returned it in 1978. Nobody had contacted me about the book, still less demanded that I pay £20,000, or whatever the accruing fine now is.

How different, how very different from the Dutch Librarian in the 90-minute monologue that brings the excellent Richard Schiff from The West Wing to the West End. He finds a copy of Baedeker’s travel guide that’s 113 years overdue and determines to ensure that “whoever he was, he’s not going to get away with it”.

That 1986 is the year when Glen Berger’s Underneath The Lintel is set doesn’t make his long, dogged pursuit of this wrongdoer seem any saner. And one interpretation of this odd, absorbing import from off-Broadway is that it’s a portrait of an obsessed, maddish nerd.

Certainly that’s the impression Schiff initially gives, with his baggy suit, his fussy manner, his earnest frown, his tiny bleat of a laugh, his complaints about having to tell his story in as obscure a place as the Duchess Theatre. But that would hardly justify even as short an evening as this, and, as his unnamed character’s journey takes him from small-town Holland to China, America and Australia, the emphasis changes.

Who does he plan to fine a few zillion guilder? The Wandering Jew? Actually yes, or so Schiff’s Librarian comes to believe. For a time it seems that, as he travels to London, then Bonn, then Derbyshire in his first attempts to track down a Jewish man who has lived for untold years and always refuses to stop and sit down, he’s a sort of parody Sherlock Holmes, transforming random coincidences into a preposterous thesis. But it seems that we’re meant to think that, yes, this forlorn wimp has either stumbled on or been drawn into a mystery without rational explanation.

It’s refreshingly unusual stuff for London and, indeed, New York. But does Berger succeed in making us take it seriously enough?

Though the Librarian’s musings expand to include the existence of God, the meaning of life and death, and his own rejection of love in the form of the girl he worshipped as a boy, you don’t feel that the dramatist can explore such ideas in any depth. His protagonist’s limitations just don’t permit it. What we finally get is an eccentric thriller based on the myth of the cobbler who told Christ to move on when he collapsed beside his shop’s lintel en route to Calvary.

Yet Schiff draws us into the stories of both the Wandering Jew and this Flying Dutchman with a performance that has its moments of passion, its patches of wry humour — and, best of all, its sense of wonder discovered and shared. Box office: 0870-890 1103

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