I missed David Haig's first play, My Boy Jack, at Hampstead Theatre. His second one, dealing with the dangerous involvement between a posh Samaritans volunteer and a sexy suicide case, is an informative, intelligent work - the kind of linear, issue- raising play that people allegedly don't write any more.
Haig's hero, Alan, is a married publisher with three children who spends his spare time manning help-lines for the Samaritans. But although Alan's wife works alongside him, his downward spiral begins when the desperate, knife-bearing Carol bursts into her local Samaritans centre. Alan establishes a rapport with her through a shared passion for Bob Dylan: she, against all the rules, becomes dependent on him. What follows is a study in mutual obsession that raises a key question: how do you avoid personal involvement when you are trying to save lives?
You could easily find fault with Haig's play. Facts, such as that 35% of Samaritan callers are silent, are blandly peddled. The flaws in Alan's marriage are never really explained. And a major scene, in which Alan and Carol achieve erotic ecstasy without touching, is eerily reminiscent of an episode in Martin Sherman's play, Bent. But Haig plausibly shows how the altruistic liberalism that drives people like Alan to do voluntary work also leaves them curiously exposed.
Conventionally reared, Alan is clearly turned on by Carol's south London sassiness and emotional vulnerability. It's an old point, dating back to Mr Gladstone's remedial work with London prostitutes, but a valid one: that do-gooding is inseparable from sex, and that helpers are often the ones most in need of attention.
But Haig, an ex-Samaritan, raises these doubts without undermining the principle of voluntary work. And, in John Dove's alert production, his play comes fiercely alive in the bruising confrontations between Alan and Carol.
Partly, it's a matter of class. Julian Wadham has just the right too-good-to-be-true quality of a smooth man who knows a bit about everything. But the revelation is Claudie Blakley. She gives a brilliantly accurate portrayal of a working-class mother who is shrewd, sexy, manipulative but also aware that life has dealt her a series of dud hands. Jane Gurnett does all she can with the underwritten role of Alan's wife.
The real thrill comes from the Wadham-Blakley encounters in which Haig mercilessly exposes the weaknesses of the public-school liberal who suddenly discovers himself a slave to passion.
Until August 26. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
