It's absolutely fabulous

It seems ridiculously early in the year to be thinking about "bests", but if this piece isn't in contention when the 2006 awards are handed out, it will be a dramatic travesty. For, as the cliché puts it, Fabulation has us from "hello"

Or it would do if Undine, a slinky, successful black PR executive, had such a simple word in her New Yorker's vocabulary. In a rocket-blasted, comic tour-de-force of a first scene, we see her desperately try to drum up some celebrity presence at a charity do in aid of "Fallopian Blockage".

Her assistant Stephie, from the Absolutely Fabulous school of ditziness, is helpless in the face of this onslaught. Then Undine learns that her husband has disappeared, taking the money but leaving her pregnant.

So much is right with these dizzying, dazzling opening minutes the worry is that playwright Lynn Nottage, director Indhu Rubasingham and Jenny Jules as Undine have peaked too soon.

Not least of the marvels is the fact that this appears to be that rarest of theatrical beasts, a drama about the black middle-classes. British writers, take note.

We needn't have fretted, though, for Nottage is in supreme, glorious control of her material. What follows, as Undine's funds, friends and luck run out, is the snappiest of modern urban morality tales. Left with nothing, Undine is forced to turn to the working-class Brooklyn family she disowned 14 years previously.

Yet this feisty harpy of a socialclimbing anti-heroine refuses to be cowed, acting instead as an archly knowing narrator on her own tragical history tour. With a little freeze-frame action here and a lascivious wink to the audience there, the magnificent Jules turns Undine into the star of a comedy fable of misadventures in the welfare system.

The impact of the occasional moment of stillness, when Undine realises that she is now the equal of those who are poor, scared and helpless, is overwhelming.

Rubasingham stages the series of sitcom-slick, quick-change scenes with verve and draws uniformly excellent turns from the supporting cast. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith has fun as Undine's smoothy-chops of a Latino lover husband and Claire Lams impresses as a string of young women.

Fabulation by name, fabulous by nature.

Until 18 March (020 7328 1000).

Fabulation