It is a wild night out on the Yorkshire moors, but Mary and her husband Reg are snug in their cottage waiting for Mary's grown-up daughter, Charlotte, to arrive on a rare visit from London. They are worried about Charlotte's journey over lonely roads and what she will make of her cat, now sick and so fragile that she is no longer let out. As the hours pass, Mary becomes increasingly neurotic and goes to bed. It is not until the early hours of the morning that we discover just what the cat's brought in.
Like a cooling cup of cocoa, George Gotts's play has a skin of naturalism and the gothic over its surface which sometimes stops you getting to the more interesting bitterness beneath. There is a touch too much of Cold Comfort Farm in the first half hour, and the hidden family secret to which Mary has turned a blind eye threatens to explode into melodrama and drip messily all over the stage. Chris White's production needs to tease out far sharper performances to carry these early scenes. Then, suddenly, Gotts stops being obvious, stirs in a creamy dollop of surrealism and as the surreal collides with memory, Cocoa suddenly becomes a play you want to gulp down in great draughts. It does what all good plays should do: make you see the world a little differently. The cosy cottage seems more like a prison, a place from which the teenage Charlotte must escape if she is to survive.
If Cocoa fails to make an entirely satisfactory theatre experience, it is because what Gotts is trying to do is very ambitious, but there is genuine promise here - though this play will not make her name, her next may well.
· Until May 5. Box office: 020- 7978 7040.
