Small is beautiful and bold in Tiny Kushner

Angels in America, Kushner’s symphonic seven-hour drama about Aids, hardly suggested that he was suited to miniaturism. In truth, all five of the pieces here are slightly too long but they neatly display Kushner’s flair for creating a sort of mad conceptual ballet, in which the ordinary collides with the extravagant and indeed the ethereal.

The first piece, Flip Flop Fly!, is a stridently declamatory cat fight between two dead women, a pageant princess and the deposed queen of Albania. Set on the moon, it feels whimsical and slight. But in the second play we see much more of Kushner’s talent for pungent observation. An austere psychotherapist, Geraldine (Kate Eifrig), tries to break off her relationship with a difficult patient (the excellent J C Cutler).

From time to time their lovers interpose; the conversation is ticklish and triangular. The result, sparky and sumptuously knowing, resembles a David Mamet rewrite of Woody Allen.

Next comes a hyperactive number, billed as an ode to the Republican anti-tax activist Howard Jarvis. The focus is a scam in which New York police officers elaborately attempt to avoid paying their dues; Jim Lichtscheidl plays more than 20 characters with pacy virtuosity.

We then return to the afterlife and to the realm of analysis, as Richard Nixon’s former therapist finds himself being scrutinised by an omniscient angel — an intriguing conceit, albeit one realised in an insufficiently dynamic fashion.

Proceedings close with something akin to agitprop: Laura Bush (Eifrig again, earnest and pained) attempting to share her enthusiasm for Dostoevsky with the ghosts of three dead Iraqi children.

Tony Taccone’s production sustains a nice rhythm across the five constituent parts, yet it’s Kushner’s linguistic dexterity that impresses most. There’s a quality of abstract oddity in his writing that, surprisingly, begets not a sense of cerebral hauteur but instead a humorous and heartfelt appreciation of the moral ambiguities of modern American life.

While not all of Tiny Kushner takes wing, there’s plenty to admire in this two-hour exhibition of the playwright’s distinctive, showy intelligence.

Until September 25. Information: 020 7328 1000. 

Tiny Kushner
Tricycle Theatre
Kilburn High Road, NW6 7JR