A heavy load of symbols is deposited in Athol Fugard’s Dimetos, which caused spasms of incomprehension, when it premiered in London in 1976. Why, it was asked, had Fugard, whose plays famously dealt with people enduring the inhumanities of apartheid, turned his attentions to an impenetrable, pseudo-Greek tragedy about incestuous desire in some remote, nameless back-water? Was there not something escapist and irrelevant about the writing of Dimetos at a time when the World Community gazed at South Africa and did nothing?

Douglas Hodge’s emotionally fraught revival, in which Jonathan Pryce plays Dimetos with a cryptic, brooding intensity, helps provide partial answers. This elusive play strikes me now as an over-veiled political allegory about liberal inertia or detachment in the face of grim personal and political circumstances. Fugard suggests how some people retreat from the world, shielding themselves from the betrayals and crimes they have perpetrated.

Designer Bunny Christie creates a primitive environment in which it looks as if modern conveniences are unknown. Dimetos, a brilliant engineer who has retired from the world to live with his niece, Lydia, to whom he seems far too close, and Sophia, Anne Reid’s poignant servant who nurses a hopeless, sublimated passion for him. A preludic, groaningly symbolic scene, in which Holliday Grainger’s shrill Lydia rescues a horse trapped in a well, gives way to plainer speaking. When Alex Lanipekun’s Danilo appears, eager to persuade Dimetos that his country needs his vision, the engineer persuades him to stay for reasons that yield catastrophic consequences: I had to avert my eyes from the spectacular, real-seeming horror on stage.

Years later, Danilo having realised unbelievably late how far Dimetos bears responsibility for that catastrophe, returns in an effort to stir his conscience. At this point Lanipekun’s inappropriate performance, delivered in a bellowing rant, contrasts with Pryce’s restrained sense of anguish. But Fugard’s obscure, symbol-laden final scenes, the atmosphere over-clouded by nightmare, mysterious stench and Dimetos’s wild attempts to use his hands to assert his creative power, serve to emphasise how far Fugard’s play is like its hero ploddingly weighed down with symbols and arch poeticisms at the expense of direct engagement with life.
Until 9 May (0870 060 6624).