Debbie Tucker Green's debut play will not suit everybody, especially when the playwright has a distinct way of saying things. In particular this play will not suit those who are weary of tales of urban fragmentation, think that dramas using monologue and giving voice to the internal should be restricted to radio, and get irritated when characters stand around discussing their relationship rather than dialling 999 for the ambulance that is so clearly and urgently required.
For the rest of us, this play, set in an all-too-familiar world, in which lives interlock but never connect, will do just fine. I cannot say that I enjoyed it very much, but I liked it a great deal. And now I cannot get it out of my head.
Jo and her husband live sandwiched between Jason and Amelia, possibly in a row of terraced houses or one of those modern, boxy maisonettes with paper-thin walls. Jason and Amelia were clearly once connected, but the connection is broken. Jo has come between them and is driving them apart. At night Amelia cannot sleep because of the noises of sex and violence coming from Jo's home. Jason, obsessed, spends his nights awake, too, his ear pressed to the wall, drinking in what is happening next door. He does not peep, he listens. Something very nasty is going on next door, and Jason and Amelia know it but do nothing. Jason listens; Amelia sleeps downstairs so that she cannot hear the noise.
Green writes dialogue that is like secret whispers and, like the characters' lives, it is fragmented and often unfinished. There is a sly, controlled power in this writing, and it is given full rein in Rufus Norris's exquisitely acted production. Katrina Lindsay's design provides a steeply raked underlit playing area upon which the actors perch precariously. It emphasises both their proximity and the vast space between them. In the final scene it lowers to become a newly cleaned floor, soon to be smeared by blood. It is like the promise of a beautiful, new day that suddenly turns bad.
· Until March 22. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
