Here is a bracing account of a play that helped to thrust its author to the forefront of the so-called Theatre of the Absurd some 50 years ago. I had not expected Ionesco’s strange parable of sex’n’violence to hold the stage so well, after many of the ideas he initiated have spread into the mainstream. But Max Lewendel’s touring production for Icarus Theatre succeeds by the strength of its acting and the steadily increasing tension. His direction introduces a more vivid sexuality than Peter Hall would have been permitted in 1955, directing the first English production at a time when theatre censorship preferred French windows to French drama.

A pupil arrives at a professor’s apartment. She is eager, impulsive and, as Amy Loughton plays her, unaware that she radiates sexuality. She twirls her fingers, she bounces, she grins and disconcerts the stammering young-old professor. John Eastman smiles awkwardly, fiddles with his academic gown, praises her slightest achievement. That she knows that one and one make two sends him into ecstasy.

But problems appear. Subtraction baffles her, though she can multiply billions. No longer is she the model pupil. Eastman’s voice hardens. He throws chalk. When he switches to philology she is slow to grasp the distinctions of pronunciation that the audience realises do not exist.

Something more alarming than education is going on here, and when eventually, as bookshelves collapse, he symbolically rapes and stabs her to death (the 40th pupil he has thus dispatched that day) we are watching the workings of unchecked power. In the closing scene the professor’s culpably forgiving maid (Julia Munrow) pins a US armband on him (in Ionesco’s text he suggests a swastika), and the author shows himself as political – and contemporary – as any writer setting his play in a modern war zone. This remains a timely and fascinating play.

Box office: 020-7837 7816. Tour details: www.icarustheatre.co.uk

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