By Robert Avila

BRITISH PLAYWRIGHT DAVID Hare has a knack for making institutions interesting. Whether he's turning his penetrating gaze on the judicial system (Murmuring Judges), for example, or the Labour Party (Absence of War), he manages to peel back the callous professionalism of bureaucrats devoted to humanity to reveal the irreducibly human moments that make up history.

Set at a 1978 UNESCO conference on world poverty in Bombay and at an English film studio 10 years later, A Map of the World pits middle-aged writer Victor Mehta (a smooth Terry Lamb) against young English left-wing journalist Stephen Andrews (an excellent Mark Farrell). The pair lock ideological horns over a speech Mehta is to deliver at the conference. A generational divide, measuring worldly fatalism against the idealism of youth, underscores their respective politics as Andrews seeks to appease the African delegates (deeply chagrined by the attacks on socialism in Mehta's satirical novels) by drafting a short preface to the speech, disclaiming the authority of fiction writers to speak on reality – a proposal that naturally leaves Mehta livid and intransigent.

It's an ironical standoff. Not only does Mehta (based on author V.S. Naipaul) represent the empire in the guise of a former colonial subject while Andrews plays white ally to the third world, but also at the red-blooded heart of their conflict lies not ideology or class or race or history so much as ... Peggy Whitton (Amy Resnick). A beautiful and brainy American actress, Whitton strolls over to the conference from a movie shoot in search of "intellectual" stimulation and proposes a solution to the deadlock between her infatuated suitors: a debate to be judged by a neutral third party (and she irresistibly sweetens the pot with a selfless offer to retire for the evening with the winner). Thus, where there's politics there's also sex. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, IMF quid pro quos follow the flow of aid to developing countries in the web of exploitation and dependency today known as "globalization."

This political melodrama has lost none of its edge since it first appeared in 1982, and perhaps has only gained subtlety with the advent of Bush Inc. and the reissue of the East-West paradigm popular in chain-mail days. Brimming with ideas and bon mots, and dizzy with constantly turning tables, A Map of the World gets a rewarding treatment from Oakland's TheatreFIRST. Modest production values in no way inhibit Clive Chafer's canny direction or the dynamic performances of his refreshingly heterogeneous cast. While we tend to sympathize with the undeniably charming Mehta when he rejects Andrews's disclaimer – "all fiction is lies" – we see that for the writer fiction serves as an artificial realm where he's in control.

Coincidentally, the year of the fictional UNESCO conference marked the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, the seminal dissection of the power relations inherent in the West's cultural representations of the East. In Said's terms it's clear that Mehta's fiction, like his real-life counterpart Naipaul's, "produces" the third world as much as it "explains" it. Indeed, Mehta's professed aim is control. Hare locates this in personal as much as imperial history. Mehta recounts a deprived colonial childhood spent "seeking by the formulation of sentences not to escape from the reality into which I was born, but to set it in order." The émigré in the imperial capital comes to identify with the empire, and adorns his first-world success with the adopted conservatism of the self-made immigrant.

Hare's story boils down to its essence as new narrative frames pile on. Ten years after the UNESCO fracas and its dramatic aftermath, a movie is being made of Mehta's novelization of the incident. This is a realm beyond Mehta's control. Moreover, the movie's lowbrow aesthetic – the project rests in the hands of an action movie director (Dana Kelly) best known for something called Pulverizer III – spoofs the author's own pretensions. The movie farce serves as meta-Mehta, a wonderful counterpoint to the rarefied discourse of art, and a winning plot device. It also indirectly points to the playwright himself as the real controlling hand. Through Hare's juxtaposition of these mediating forms of representation – the book versus the film versus, implicitly, the play's own rendering of the story – we see the characters as products of a historical process in which art and institutions leave only traces and no adequate summation.