THEATRE: Three Chamber Plays; The Gate, London

Written for the 161-seat Intimate Theatre in Stockholm, Strindberg's five Chamber Plays pioneered intense, close-to-the-audience drama, at the same time as deploying, with an almost droll perversity, defiantly large casts in that small space. Now who, in our own day, does this remind you of? Notting Hill's Gate theatre of course.

It makes perfect sense that this venue is, and long has been, a stout champion of the Swedish genius's work and it's no great shock that it should have chosen to kick off 1997 - the 90th anniversary of these pieces - with a presentation of three of the chamber plays. Storm, After the Fire, and The Ghost Sonata, can be seen either in alternating pairs or (on Thursdays and Saturdays) as a full trio.

This latter option, which commits you to a slightly dazing four-and-a- quarter-hour immersion in Strindberg's tormented imagination, has one sizeable drawback. The Ghost Sonata, the best known and most highly regarded of the threesome, receives here, in Georgina Van Welie's production, the least persuasive staging. It comes as an anti-climactic climax to the lengthy proceedings. The play you should on no account miss is the least well-known, After the Fire: director Loveday Ingram binds its highly disjunct elements into a powerfully coherent theatrical experience.

The connecting threads between these works are more like twisted steel cable than yarn or gossamer. In all three plays, there's a symbolically charged, guilt-haunted house and a homecoming that makes the dead past jerk into lurid life. These are post-mortem plays that strain after a redemption in which they can't quite bring themselves to believe. You could say that old scores are unsettled.

In Storm, whose sulphurously sultry atmosphere isn't strongly enough conveyed by Wils Wilson's well-acted production, a fussy, fiftysomething, generically named Man (John Grillo) discovers that the flat upstairs has been occupied by his young ex-wife and his little daughter, whom the wife's violent adventurer of a second husband is exploiting and degrading. The play shows how the willed serenity of the Man's solitude is disrupted and how he fights to get it back. Just how convincingly he has reachieved it at the end is left valuably in doubt by Grillo's performance.

The raking over the ashes of the past becomes a literal business in After the Fire, where Dudley Sutton's excellent Stranger, a man of the world with the face of an experience-wrecked putto, returns, after many years, to the ancestral home to find that it has just been burned down in nefarious circumstances. As he conducts the psychic archaeology into his family's shame, you're reminded irresistibly of the kind of spiritual detective JB Priestley wheels on in plays like An Inspector Calls. Except that here the Stranger has the half-amused detachment of someone who, it's intimated, may be seeing life from the perspective of someone who has died and come back with a ghost's undeluded vision.

This play strikes me as a good deal more honest in its balance between the positive and the negative than The Ghost Sonata, where the transcendence of the Student's final speech does not emerge organically from the harrowing bizarreries that precede it but feels tacked-on. Van Welie's production lacks the savage power this drama needs, but Diana Fairfax, given the uncommon brief of acting the part of a woman who has turned into a mummy who behaves like a parrot, achieves some wonderfully surprising moments of squawking mid-species existence.

To 1 Feb. Booking: 0171-229 5387 Paul Taylor