Oleanna, Garrick Theatre, London

There were cries of "Get the bitch!" from the audiences in New York. In London, the more restrained Brits contented themselves with simply applauding when the American professor eventually lost his rag and beat the hell out of his troublesome female pupil. The play divided people - wife from husband, boyfriend from girlfriend, boyfriend from boyfriend - and not always along predictable gender lines. It divided one from oneself, too. Nothing if not controversial and calculatedly inflammatory, the piece left even well-wishers in two minds about whether it generated light as well as heat.

And now, almost exactly a decade later, David Mamet's Oleanna returns to London in a production directed by Lindsay Posner that happily turns out to be responsibly imbalanced and divisive. Aaron Eckhart is close to perfection as the professor who, misinterpreting the exhibitions of need and vulnerability by his young female charge, exposes himself beyond the needs of care, caution, and duty. Clear, well-defined and lopsidedly cast (Ms Julia Stiles is not very good), the new production is intelligent enough to know that the old late-Eighties battle lines are not the most illuminating way to continue this argument.

My own view (reinforced by the intelligence of what is on offer at the Garrick) is that, if you were to reflect on the crucial abdication of power from the top down in academe in the earlier Thatcher years, you could play Oleanna with the genders reversed and the meaning and the controversy would remain absolutely in place. For power (not sex, gender or youth vs age) is the name of the game in Oleanna, and academe is the best setting in which to meditate on it. According to taste, you will either feel that Mamet has swooped to the jugular on this front, or crashed in crassly.

I was in the latter camp before seeing this revival, and I'm of the firmly refusenik camp in finding the normally excellent Stiles's layered performance too bland, creamy and beautiful here. It now strikes me as very important to the play that the professor is desperately struggling to say something to himself and to his pupils that is true. Anyone who thinks that this project is less than heroic should try turning the clock back and attempt to keep the torch of the humanities flaming in universities in the mid-1980s. Clairvoyant, clear, natty, over-neat - and very nearly essential.

To 17 July (020-7494 5085)