Theatre; That old Genet sais quoi

HALFWAY through the British premiere of Jean Genet's Splendid's, a gangster dresses up as the heiress his mob have just killed and appears on a hotel balcony to the ecstasy of the assembled crowd.

This is the high point of Neil Bartlett's production, thanks partly to the choice of the unlikeliest gang member, Everett Quinton's sewer- rat Johnny, as the belle in the ball-gown. It also heralds Genet's future achievements in The Maids and The Balcony as the greatest transformation artist since Pirandello. If Splendid's had arrived on the stage in the 1950s instead of being locked away for over 40 years, would it have achieved a comparable impact? Probably yes, so far as the critical industry is concerned, as it contains all the elements that are supposed to make Genet exciting. In its fable of a cornered gang, enjoying their last hours of freedom in a luxury hotel, it turns Catholicism, monarchy, sex and moral courage inside out, in an implacable declaration of hatred against the rich and their protective institutions. Also, it shows a criminal outsider desecrating traditional culture in strict classical form.

Splendid's owes an equal debt to Racine and to American movies and crime fiction. Maybe, at the start of his playwriting career, that was Genet's means of releasing himself from autobiography. Certainly that is why it compares so poorly in performance with his later plays. In them you receive the force of unfettered imagination. In this prototype (judging from Bartlett's translation) you experience a careful exercise in ventriloquism, in which the criminals of Genet's memory are displaced by the fictional hoodlums of Hollywood and James Hadley Chase. The tone verges on parody; and there is sometimes the nasty feeling that this severest of artists is attempting a joke.

Again, the play may have been distorted by time. There is no recapturing the effect it might have had on the post-Occupation French stage. In Bartlett's production, with tuxedo-clad dandies practising haughty walk- downs, and louche little dance numbers for Julian Clary and David Foxxe, the whole thing - not only the ball-gown scene - becomes a fancy-dress thrash, where guests can swish about and admire their reflections with no real fear of being gunned down by the police.

Following Pinter and Peter Brook, Evald Flisar's What About Leonardo? is the latest piece inspired by the clinical writings of Oliver Sacks. Set in a neurological institute, it focuses on the case of Martin, a victim of progressive amnesia who develops an inexhaustible capacity for imitative learning. There follows a struggle between the institute's director, who wants to restore the patient's freedom of choice, and an invading psychotherapist, who sees a chance of converting the former delicatessen proprietor into an intellectual superman.

From a British standpoint, the Slovenian author is too keen to hoist the situation into political allegory before estab- lishing its realist credibility; nor, in themselves, are its ideas of much interest. In the theatrical context, though, as material for psychodrama and robotic performance, they become charged with sinister comedy: aswhen the brainwashed Martin (Peter Lindford) returns as an exhibition dancer and virtuoso violinist, who then short-circuits a session of Shakespearean therapy to a lethal conclusion. In Janine Wunsche's production the other inmates are beautifully established as individual characters as well as case histories. This is Sacks's gift to the theatre: that he has enlarged the scope of drama to embrace the mentally ill.

In Diana Morgan's The Dark Stranger - an unjustly forgotten piece from 1960 - it is a moot point whether or not the heroine is off her rocker. Seldom stirring out of bed except for the gin bottle, and sustaining her precarious existence in her niece's house by her clairvoyant earnings, Madame Rowlands (the gorgeously bewigged Ruth Madoc) fatally rocks the boat by informing a nervous client that the figure of Death has entered the room. Who is the Grim Reaper after - Madame R's visitor, her niece, or her wastrel son? Answering that question reveals small-town Wales as a moral desert in which everyone would welcome a death in the family. The play depends too heavily on alcohol to sort out its narrative problems. But Madoc's Madame R develops magnificently: a reclusive fantasist who has deliberately turned her back on the ugly world of facts,she becomes a devastating realist once into the fortune-telling mode. Stephen Rayne's production suggests a collaboration between Durrenmatt and Gwyn Thomas.

It would be nice to welcome the Chichester transfer of Alan Ayckbourn's A Word from Our Sponsor, hastily recast after the sadly premature death of Sophie Winter. But, coming from this of all living playwrights, the show betrays staggering theatrical incompetence. The story of a Christian musical that gets hijacked by the devil, it gets its lines crossed between a satire on arts sponsorship and a melodrama on evil. Once in charge of the show, the devil recasts Mary as Herod's queen - that is one of the better jokes. The characters include a dithering vicar, a thuggish club owner, and a queen-bee Tory widow; who are all propelled out of character by a plot which arouses no interest in what will happen next. The music is dire. Curtains.

Unforgettable, a compilation show about Nat King Cole, marks yet another step in the relentless musical takeover of the West End. As you would expect, it consists of a string of old favourites, threaded on an unilluminating summary of its subject's life. It is, however, the work of Clarke Peters: not exactly a star, but a performer of all-round accomplishment and relaxed charm. Watch his performance of "Route 66", capturing the euphoria of the road as he elegantly changes invisible gears; or a blues calypso, sung to simple percussion accompaniment, and drawing spontaneous audience participation. Go to sneer, and stay to cheer.

'Splendid's': Lyric, W6, 0181 741 2311. 'What About Leonardo?': Lilian Baylis, EC1, 0171 713 6000. 'The Dark Stranger': King's Head, N1, 0171 226 1916. 'A Word from Our Sponsor': Chichester Minerva, 0124 378 1312. 'Unforgettable: The Nat King Cole Story': Garrick, WC2, 0171 494 5085.