Anne of Cleves was a "picture" bride, and when Henry VIII saw her in the flesh he wanted to send her back. When the Armenian photographer Aram, now settled in Milwaukee, chooses a bride from the photos of girls in an Istanbul orphanage, he selects a dead girl. Instead, they send him 15-year-old Seta, bursting with life and her good luck at having survived when so many Armenians, including her own family, died in the Turkish-led massacre of 1915. But you get the impression that Aram would quite like to send her back, particularly when the babies do not start arriving as expected.
Richard Kalinoski's small, quiet play has a big, unashamedly sentimental heart as it charts Aram and Seta's difficult marriage and explores how it is possible to live when all the rest of your family have died. Aram keeps a photo of his dead parents and brothers on display, their heads and faces missing. It is Seta's job to fill the gaps in the family portrait with a new generation. But with the past crushing the present, is it possible for Aram and Seta to find happiness, or at least an accommodation?
This is not a great drama, but it is a highly effective one, even if its memory-play structure often seems a little awkward and cloying. Giles Croft quite rightly keeps the direction simple. And if Youssef Kerkour does not quite win your sympathy for the unyielding Aram, and Karine Bedrossian sounds as if she just arrived from an English gels' boarding school rather than an Istanbul orphanage, these actors capture the quiet pain of a marriage being suffocated by history and an avalanche of grief.
· Until November 17. Box office: 0115-941 9419.
