Violet is old and alone and returning to the empty house where she lived with her husband and brought up her son and daughter. She wants to be alone, but memories and Anna - an irritatingly helpful local waif with problems of her own - keep intruding on Violet's carefully laid plans. Then there's that little difficulty with the living room mirror: Violet's daughter, Mandy, keeps on appearing in the glass, even though she is supposed to be in Australia.
The tiny Theatre 503 has proved again and again that it has its finger on the pulse of new writing and an eye for spotting and encouraging playwrights just starting out on their careers. Christina Katic falls into that category, and she may yet write a good play - but this isn't it. Perhaps that is because Katic is trying to do something rather difficult, in taking what is essentially a domestic naturalistic scenario of mother-daughter estrangement and and putting it within a dreamlike Alice-in-Wonderland framework.
I can see why it might have looked intriguing on paper. But if you create a dream, it must have consistent internal logic, and naturalistic scenarios demand psychologically developed characters. Until the final - alas, rather lame - twist, it makes no sense why Anna insists on hanging around; nor, in view of the final revelations, that she starts dreaming the same dream as Violet.
You would have thought the director and dramaturg would have helped sort out some of the glitches in the script long before the play went into rehearsal. It is 90 minutes that proves that nurturing the next generation of playwrights is not just about staging plays, but also about judging when it is the right moment to expose their work in public.
· Until June 11. Box office: 020-7978 7040.
