Sometimes a new play feels just like an old play; and watching Wesley Moore's A Reckoning it is impossible not to be reminded of David Mamet's Oleanna. But, since this is a father-daughter play, this is Mamet minus the sexual tension as well as the distilled dialogue and needling provocation.
Jonathan Pryce plays a distinguished San Francisco architect named Spencer whose mourning for the death of his wife is rudely shattered by his daughter, Irene. She accuses him of continuous emotional torment during childhood: of locking her in a closet, force-feeding her, attacking her with tweezers. Unable to persuade him to join her in therapy, Irene takes her father to court with predictably devastating results.
The problem is it all feels like drama-by-numbers. Mr Moore pushes the expected emotional buttons so that we first share Spencer's outrage and then sympathy for the accusatory Irene; but since the father's real crime is a "cold resolve" which he has transmitted to his daughter, it is difficult for us to engage profoundly with her plight. Moreover, the dialogue frequently lapses into inflated rhetoric. When, for instance, the daughter asks her father, "what happened to all those visionary drawings of cities, of new civilisations almost?" she makes him sound absurdly like a failed Leonardo instead of the boss of a thriving architectural business.
But the play's fatal flaw is that it lacks the "quiet resonance" that the father somewhat pretentiously finds in his daughter's mock-Queen Anne house. It never rises above the strains of father-daughter relationships nor the blurred memories of childhood's emotional wounds to become about something larger than itself. Moore might have turned the play into an assault on interfering therapists or, like Mamet in Oleanna, an attack on the American resort to litigation to solve personal problems. Instead he stays within the emotion-tugging confines of the made-for-TV movie.
What attracted Pryce to such an overtly manipulative piece is hard to say; but he gives a performance of considerable dignity that manages to blend outrage, hurt, compassion and even a rueful guilt. It is to his credit, and that of the director, Richard Seyd, that he eschews the tearful, pain-racked kneeling that the stage directions finally demand. As for Flora Montgomery, she does all she can to animate a character whose driving motive seems a morose vindictiveness.
A battle-royal between two dramatic equals would have been interesting to watch but this is largely a tale of glumly reactive filial revenge. For a real study of the tensions between fathers and daughters and the cosmic upheavals they can provoke, you'd be better off with King Lear.
· Until May 3. Box office: 020-7478 0100
