Mid-20th-century man in crisis, despairing of his lost dreams, lost youth and his wife's loss of sex drive is a familiar story on our stages. It is easy pickings for the playwright, for almost everyone in the audience over the age of 40 will be regretting something. CP Taylor's 1966 play is slightly different in that it yokes the personal and the political through the friendship of two Jewish men living in Glasgow's Gorbals from 1931 (when Ramsay McDonald's government was in power) until 1965 (when Harold Wilson governed).
There are times during this long, slow-burn of a play when you feel every minute of its 35-year span. Morris, a champagne Marxist cushioned by his clothing manufacturer father's fortune, believes that world socialism is just around the corner. He is unlikely best friends with Alec, one of his father's factory hands, a quiet man content with his lot and about to marry the pennypinching Miriam and take up residence in the Gorbals.
When the second world war results in the loss of Morris's wealth, he and his young family also end up in the Gorbals, where he keeps his dream of socialism alive despite crushing blows delivered by experience and history. Alec and Morris meet regularly on a park bench and in Alec's tenement - to renew their friendship and rake over the ashes of their lives, where the occasional ember of dream still glows.
Like spluttering, ineffective firebrand Morris, this is not going to set the world alight. But in Mark Rosenblatt's period production, there is something rather moving about seeing these vanished lives laid bare. It has a quiet dignity, so you don't mind too much that the play is showing its age or that Taylor's bread and butter had been sliced a little too thickly.
· Until November 27. Box office: 020-7328 1000.
