Sometimes you get a strong sense of the huge pleasure that the playwright took in writing a play. Such pleasure is infectious, and it's evident in Biyi Bandele's meditation on happiness and death. Brixton Stories, a revised version of a play first seen in the RSC's This Other Eden season in 2001, is a slight and giddy work that owes debts to Federico García Lorca, Flann O'Brien and Lewis Carroll, yet has a pop and fizz that is uniquely its own. Bandele conjures the life, nightmares and death of Ossie Jones, a south London immigration lawyer who succeeds where most of us fail: he dies a happy man.
The title is slightly misleading. Yes, Bandele offers up a vivid portrait of the streets of Brixton, including an entrepreneurial wordsmith who offloads "discombobulated" or "tintinnabulation" to passersby for 10p a word. (One man buys an entire paragraph for his wife's birthday.) There is the usual cast of eccentrics and philosophical conmen, including one who announces grandly: "I do not get money off the government or any other criminal element."
All these are a sideshow to the main event: the touching depiction of the relationship between Ossie and his daughter, Nehushta, and a long sequence that you initially assume is a dream, a Kafkaesque nightmare of false conviction and imprisonment, but which turns out to be a 15-year coma.
Ossie may not be a lucky man - his beloved wife died in childbirth - but he is blessed in other ways, even making the best of an evening at a dire Pinteresque play in a pub theatre.
Not everybody will buy the play's whimsy, and Bandele, who also directs, doesn't quite convince us that this rambling piece has genuine claims to be on the stage rather than the page. But I found its oddities enormously appealing, and brilliant performances from Geoff Aymer, Sheri-An Davis, Cush Jumbo and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett made me a very happy woman indeed.
· Until September 23. Box office: 0870 0500 511.
