The pub play is rapidly becoming a fixed genre. Like Conor McPherson's The Weir, Owen McCafferty's Closing Time and Doug Lucie's The Green Man, Simon Stephens's new play uses the public bar as a source of melancholic confession. Stephens springs the odd surprise, but I begin to wish dramatists would find more original settings in which to delineate male misery.
At first we seem to be in routinely familiar territory. The setting is a desolate East End boozer a week before Christmas. The barman is a gloomy Wicklow exile grieving over his separation from his seven-year-old son. And, of his Saturday-night regulars, Billy is an effing-and-blinding builder who lives at home with his mum, while Guiseppe is an aged Italian hairdresser still haunted by the death of his English wife. We don't, however, learn much beyond the fact that pubs are second homes for sad, solitary men.
Matters perk up decisively with the arrival of Charlie - a caustic postman mysteriously clutching a cello case. Not only is he a much-needed catalyst who, like Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, exposes everyone else's problems before revealing his own. He is also compellingly played by Paul Ritter with the kind of wheedling aggression that recalls Donald Pleasence in The Caretaker, and with a cawing, nasal voice that mixes Manchester with the Mile End Road.
But, although Jo McInnes's production is perfectly plausible and there are good performances from Fred Ridgeway as the pained publican, Bernard Gallagher as the bereaved barber and Lee Ross as the Oedipal tosser, something is missing. Where McPherson, McCafferty and Lucie all turned their four-ale bars into social and even national metaphors, Stephens's is simply a repository for a group of no-hopers. Stephens gives us eccentric personal detail in place of any great revelations about life beyond the bar. The result leaves me with the urge to shout out, in the case of this particular overworked genre, "Time, gentlemen please."
· Until January 31. Box office: 020-7610 4224.
