All theatre is a form of voyeurism. Ultz's design for John Donnelly's play, presented at the Theatre Upstairs as part of the court's Young Playwrights' season, certainly rubs this in. The audience sits on two sides of a strip-lit, rectangular box watching the characters through mirrored walls. We can see them but they can't see us which lends the experience an eerie alienation.
At first we feel frustratingly denied the usual actor-audience contact: the sense of detachment is intensified by the fact that Donnelly's three characters speak in intercut monologues.
But gradually the point of the staging becomes clear. This is a play about isolated, lonely people describing one particular day in their increasingly desperate lives; and, once you become attuned to their rhythms, the play acquires a haunting fascination.
Helen, we gradually learn, is the wife of a farmer who has died after his cattle have been exterminated during the foot-and-mouth outbreak. Stephen is a black, would-be-cool middle-management figure obsessed by his ex-lover. And Jamie is a pugnacious young squaddie desperate to get laid on the eve of going off to war. The three figures never converse; but their speeches sometimes echo and bounce off each other in a way that reflects their shared yearning for contact with the dead, the lost and the living.
Donnelly has clearly studied Beckett, McPherson and Kane, who sound like a firm of solicitors but who are past masters of monologue. And, even if Donnelly's play depends too much on withheld information, he can cut to the emotional quick. Jamie, in particular, comes fiercely alive in Bryan Dick's performance as a cockily insecure bantam who craves a priest's consoling touch. Brid Brennan also lends the suicidal Helen an angry longing for the physical warmth of her dead husband. And Don Gilet conveys the self-pitying delusions of a man suffering the pangs of despised love.
Surprisingly Donnelly even offers us an unfashionable glimmer of hope. And, although Femi Elufowoju's stylised production initially suggests we are watching a scientific experiment or a porn-show, we slowly become involved in the characters' emotional lives. Death may be a great leveller but desperation is an even greater unifier.
· Until September 25. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
