Play without words, NT Lyttelton Loft, London

A servant of no mastery

This piece by Matthew Bourne may be entitled Play Without Words, but it isn't really a play – hardly enough plot – and it isn't dance or mime either. Perhaps it is best described as a dumbshow with a few little dance steps thrown in occasionally, generally to provide humour. The starting point of the story is clearly Joseph Losey's film The Servant (script by Pinter after Robin Maugham): new house-owner, fiancée, manservant and maidservant in a struggle for dominance. But this stage version lacks the sharpness of the movie.

Bourne adds another main character, an old friend who seduces the fiancée. Bourne's biggest change, however, is having each character performed by two or usually three players. That lets him show alternative versions: the maid simultaneously seducing and rebuffing her employer, a couple snogging on the way up to bed while they also part on the doorstep with a chaste kiss.

I couldn't help thinking, however, that a prime purpose must be to fill up the stage, which would otherwise have looked very empty, and also to disguise how thin the action is much of the time. Long drawn out, too: the sex scenes especially drag heavily on and on, but never get anywhere. Losey's film suggested far more with just a glimpse of protruding legs seen from behind an armchair than Bourne can show with any amount of pawing and groping.

Within these limitations, the mainly pedestrian movement is neatly handled, especially the primly determined way in which the fiancée makes her way around the house, going to and fro. It is another matter whether there is really enough drama or originality here to convince the new audiences whom the National Theatre hopes to attract to its Transformation season, which commissioned Bourne, especially given the extreme discomfort of the rejigged Lyttelton auditorium.

A very positive feature, however, is the jazz score written by Terry Davies and played by a small group under Michael Haslam, visible at the side of the stage (the wind players Sarah Homer and Simon Gardner are particularly effective). I wasn't entirely sure about its period quality, but the music kept the show going and contributed probably more than any other element to its total effect.

Bourne's New Adventures group provides the actor-dancers; they work adequately, but having each role shared draws attention to a great deal of unevenness. Lez Brotherston's 1960s costumes identify the triple-cast characters, even when they don't look much alike, and his setting adapts to suggest various London locations, dominated by a highly phallic Post Office Tower (but how did it get south of the tower of Big Ben?)

Incidentally, if I were a smoker I should be angry to see everyone lighting up all the time in a non-smoking theatre. Still, it gives the players something to do.

To 14 September (020-7452 3000)