This disturbing first play by DC Moore takes us inside the warped mind of an unapologetic white racist. The hero, Frank, is first glimpsed as a pseudo-tough, Bible-reading, drug-dealing history student. But he quickly drops out of uni to work in the kiosk of a multiplex cinema. Though a moody loner, Frank sexually attracts his colleagues, including a young Asian female, Mamta. When Mamta is appointed kiosk supervisor, the depth of Frank's racism is revealed; in the play's best scene, he articulates his half-baked theories to Mamta only to be routed by her intellectually and beaten up, offstage, by her brother.
My main beef about Moore's 70-minute play is that it deals more in symptoms than in causes. What we never learn is the source of Frank's one-eyed political stance. I was also puzzled by Mamta's insistence that her father is a mirror image of Frank, and by her cold-hearted delight in her brother's brutality. If Moore is implying that white racism breeds its own form of revenge, he needs to investigate the idea more thoroughly.
But, for all its sins of omission, Moore's play suggests there is something diseased about a culture that provides internet-derived card games called Dictators' Top Trumps. Rafe Spall gives a very good performance, in Maria Aberg's deftly staged production, as Frank: he has exactly the right mixture of dogmatic certainty and emotional insecurity. Fiona Wade as his self-assured Asian supervisor and Thomas Morrison and Christine Bottomley as the colleagues drawn to this clenched solitary are also first-rate. It's a promising first play but, like Mike Bartlett's My Child in the Court's downstairs theatre, you feel it would gain from the use of a wider-angled political lens.
· Until June 23. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
