Like Webster in the TS Eliot poem, Laura Wade is "much possessed by death". After a play about terminal illness at the Soho, she now comes up with an 80-minute Gothic shortie at the Theatre Upstairs that's filled with the stench of mortality. But, while I admire the ingenuity of Wade's dramatic structure, there is something oddly deterministic about her view of the universe: in Wade's world, if you're not dead, you're a living corpse.
At one point a character invokes Dante's circles of hell; and there is a diabolical circularity to Wade's own play. It starts with a hotel chambermaid's discovery of a dead body; and, as the play tracks back in time, each scene explains its predecessor. As we meet, in turn, the manager of a self-storage facility and his solitary wife, a sadistic businesswoman and her dog-loving toyboy and finally a weird hotel-guest, the connections all become apparent. What La Ronde does for sex, Wade's play does for death.
The more closely you examine it, the cleverer the play's structure becomes. But what troubles me is Wade's lack of explanation of the source of her characters' unhappiness. Is it that they live in a "provincial shithole"? Is it something to do with the pressures of modern society? Or the result of chemical imbalance? Thus Kate, the brutal businesswoman, is shown in a temper; but how much this stems from her complex sexuality, her demanding job or her cross-questioning by the police is left unclear.
Wade is clearly haunted by some sickness in the world at large and the feeling that we lead increasingly isolated lives. Beautifully played by Niamh Cusack, the storage-owner's wife is, for instance, confronted by an uncommunicative husband and the lack of any useful role: as she wanly says at one point, "back in my box". But the very tightness of the structure forbids any larger exploration of the social causes of her sadness.
Admittedly Anna Mackmin's chillingly effective, aurally unnerving production is filled with strange screams of death. And there are vibrant performances from Paul Copley as the tight-lipped storage man, Tamzin Outhwaite as the over-achieving sadist and Laura Elphinstone as the angel-of-death chambermaid. But, having proved herself the laureate of doom, one just hopes that, for her own sake, Laura Wade will now move on.
· Until March 26. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
