Photo: Tristram Kenton
Of the audacious structure of her play about the lives of two couples following a terrorist attack, Jane Bodie says, "It came to me so clearly one day and it felt so uncomplicated." It does, too, and lends itself to a deft tracing back through a year with one couple to the point of the attack, and forward one year from it with the other.
Within this impressive structure, there are flaws in the writing, but like Osama the Hero (playing in a double bill alongside A Single Act), Bodie's play is worth seeing as an attempt to dramatise the post-9/11 reality. Structure aside, she is strongest on observational writing about her couples: affluent Neil and Clea, with their plush pad in the city, and the less worldly Michelle and Scott, sinking into domestic abuse in the suburbs.
Anthony Clark's direction teases out the subtleties in Bodie's writing - Michelle, at her most vulnerable even takes to speaking like Scott - while Patrick Connellan's set can be both anonymous and evocative. With its minimalist polished concrete look, it does have its warm moments, lit in happy pink, but mostly hangs over the action like brooding walls of bruises.
Where the play struggles is in the relationship it suggests between external reality and the domestic scenarios, and this is the heart of the writing challenge here. Bodie deliberately leaves this relationship open-ended but does so too emphatically, so that we can't read her characters: is Scott moved to violence because of the terror attack, or is he just a violent bully? Also, the bomb and its immediate aftermath simply doesn't feel real. When Neil and Clea return separately to the sanctuary of their flat, they don't do what most would do at this juncture. They don't put the television on, and stare at it in shock.
· Until June 11. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
