Austrian playwright Odön von Horváth's 1936 'Don Juan Comes Back from the War' is the sort of weighty work that begs a lavish European-scale budget and a Barbican-size stage: that its last London revival (in 1995) was at the tiny Gate Theatre and this one at the even smaller Finborough speaks volumes about Vin Horthath's stature in the UK.
Nonetheless, director Andrea Ferran has pulled out every stop to help us forget this is a 50-seat black box above a wine bar, reconfiguring the room with a large projecting stage and assembling a cast that includes some serious big hitters, not least RSC and NT regular Zubin Varla in the title role.
Horváth's Don Juan is a German returned from the trenches of the Great War to discover a changed world. The economy is disintegrating, old institutions are dying and legendary lover Juan has lost his mojo. Middle-aged and physically ailing, as the play commences he hysterically indulges in one last Bacchanal before renouncing sex for good.
Yet he cannot escape his past: every woman he meets is the cracked reflection of some old lover or other.
Varla gives a superb central performance as a disintegrating avatar of European manhood, wracked with remorse and physical pain as he vainly searches for his place in the world.
And Ferran does an excellent job of coherently marshalling a play with 23 named parts using a cast of just seven. Nonetheless, it's a pretty gruelling experience, running for almost two hours with no interval and settling for an agonised note that doesn't really do justice to the considerable surreal humour in Duncan Macmillan's new adaptation.