The Fever, Royal Court, London

Reviewed by Michael Coveney

I don't know what people who give generously to charities think about themselves, but here comes Wallace Shawn to suggest that you might be misguided to suppose that adopting a caring attitude necessarily makes you a good citizen.

Not a nice thought, is it? But the brilliant thing about Shawn's monologue for a pampered liberal traveller struck down by vomiting fits in a war-torn small country in, say, Latin America is that the judgmental element implicit in that first paragraph is completely absent in the play.

Shawn himself first delivered the monologue in private homes in his native Manhattan and then took it into theatres, including the Royal Court's upstairs studio in 1991, lisping and kvetching in an armchair while blinking at the light like a liberated mole.

By contrast, Clare Higgins takes the stage with tremendous bravura, delivering the carefully wrought but never ostentatious prose with a sense of both helplessness and anger, making connections between creature comforts and slave labour and declaring that we, the audience, no less than she, the witness, could not exist without the poor doing awful work. We need them. Their poverty is precious to us.

One of Andrew Marr's guests on Start the Week said that the play wasn't really a play at all. Even if you were to concede that there is such a thing as "a play" by definition, the stark un-theatricality of The Fever is in effect the opposite, a point made by the highly visible unused scenery, the stark back wall, the piled-up chairs. Higgins, in white blouse and blue jeans, is both an abstract voice and a highly charged theatrical presence: it's like Beckett with bottom and bellyache.

She drifts skilfully between oratorical modes of reflection, despair, anecdotal precision and a political righteousness fuelled by fear. The traveller's consoling certainties in life are Beethoven, dancers flying into each other's arms, clean linen, a bottle of wine; the questions for which, tragically, there are no answers, are to do with how we should live, how we should feel, what we should think. If the exercise is indeed one of self-indulgent liberal meditation, it's one that is articulated with searing honesty and a dry, elegant wittiness. Maybe it's OK to hate Comic Relief after all.

To 2 May (020-7565 5000; www.royalcourttheatre.com )