Affluent Left-wing writers of distinction and their supportive tribes in London and Manhattan, eager to inflict the still sharp pricks of masochism upon themselves for clinging to wealth at the expense of the poor, revere Wallace Shawn and this preposterous play of his, dating from 1990.

Holed up in some poor, civil-war-ridden country in the bathroom of a lousy hotel with only a water-bug for company, a conscience-laden American delivers an interminable, 90-minute monologue, whose diffuse, repetitive nature is presumably attributable to the shivers and shakes of fever.

Dominic Cooke’s bare-stage production, in which an American-accented Clare Higgins fluently represents Shawn’s self-accusing narrator, does nothing to invalidate the insult levelled against the play by the New York Times in 1990 when Frank Rich described it as “an almost entirely humourless assault on the privileged class by one of its card-carrying members”. The Fever, through its speaker’s glum prose, hammers home the idea that while Americans who are humane, cultured and liberal feel guilt about the impoverished who labour for them, they refuse to contemplate the political change that would transform such people’s lives. The rich will not surrender their riches.

As an indictment of guiltily selfish American materialism, though without a flicker of Shavian wit or authentic iconoclasm, The Fever cannot be faulted, even if its embroidered variations on the theme keep striking repetitive chords.

Shawn’s narrator, though, while describing her life as “irredeemably corrupt”, feels entitlement to affluence. She envisages the poor whom she wishes to soothe with medicines as human irritants and turns apocalyptic, prepared to see them despatched to rotten neighbourhoods, ruined and ultimately “executed” as threats to her comfortable life. Shawn does not condemn the liberal rich, he renders them luridly unbelievable.
Until 2 May (020 7565 5000).