In The Jungle Of Cities

Arcola Theatre, London E8

3 Stars

If today a theatre received a play written by a 23-year-old without much in the way of a coherent narrative but requiring a cast of 10 and nearly two-and-a-half hours in which to poetically recount it, I'm not sure there would be much of a battle to stage a production.

So the appeal of the understandably rarely-performed In the Jungle Of Cities seems almost entirely to be that it is one of Bertholt Brecht's early experiments.

Even so, this bizarre and overblown tale of a fight between two men - presented as an abstract wrestling match over the space of several months and years - fascinates and has its comic moments.

The opponents are young bookseller George Garga and Malaysian lumber merchant Shlink who comes to buy an "opinion" on a book. As their positions of power continuously reverse, events take an even stranger and darker turn

Garga becomes the erratic boss of the lumber business while the ousted Shlink goes to live with the former's impoverished family from the prairies who have moved to the volatile metropolis of Chicago.

Declaring her love for Shlink, George's naive sister Mary is masochistically drawn into the seedy world of gangsters that these men occupy, eventually becoming a prostitute.

A similar fate inevitably befalls Jane, Garga's pantomimically sexualised girlfriend, later to be wife. But if the play's women become little more than burlesques, traded and exploited for the function they serve, then the intent is presumably to expose rather than glorify a world of misogyny.

Ultimately the convolutions of words, bodies and minds belomg to the two atypical alpha-male protagonists yet their social relations mean that other unusual inhabitants of the concrete jungle get are drawn in too.

The large cast shows great stamina, using the multifaceted spaces of the text and the Arcola's main studio space to full effect.

It seems that the decision to downplay the 1912 Chicago setting was made by the production team rather than translator Gerhard Nellhaus yet this attempt to make the play a more mystical depiction of a city where the false freedom of capitalism has mutated seems to be a mistake - even if it is a well-meaning one.

When Brecht wrote the play he was not yet the understated Marxist dialectician he became, thus the struggle on stage is not between East and West, city and countryside or capitalism and socialism but that of a confused young man.

While it is an admirable yet perplexing example of a writer who has not yet matured, In the Jungle Of Cities sometimes risks fuelling the misconception that Brecht's work is pretentious or incomprehensible.

As someone who drew upon both Chinese theatre traditions and US popular culture, Brecht once mused that new wine in old bottles tends to go sour, though this enjoyable production seems to be the other way round.

What this carnivalesque play shows is that political theatre now needs new wine in new bottles.

Runs until October 5. Box office: (020) 7503-1646.