At a bare 15 minutes, Martin Crimp's latest play stops at the point where most plays are getting going, but you don't feel cheated. This is a miniature only in terms of length, and it is treated as big as it deserves in Katie Mitchell's impeccable and impeccably acted production.
A man is telling a story to two other people in a bare office - a murderous story about a massacre. He tells of a man who walks into a school and shoots the receptionist in the mouth. He moves on to a classroom where he takes out the teacher. Then he starts on the children, one by one.
At first you think that the three people are probably colleagues developing a screenplay, perhaps one of those trashy made-for-TV movies that feed on real-life horror stories. After a short while, it becomes apparent that this is some kind of performance. The man telling the story keeps needing, much to his annoyance, to be prompted by a woman who is sitting in the audience with a copy of the script.
In the final section, the man stands in front of a microphone and sings a bluesy ballad about a postman who one morning refuses to get up. Something has snapped. There is a voice in his head telling him to do something unspeakable.
There is no doubt that this is both a performance and yet it is also real. The distinctions between performance and story, actor and reality are entirely blurred. The song curls through the auditorium and into your brain like a whiff of smoke from a still-warm gun. It reeks of the exhaustion of someone who has carried anger around for longer than they can bear.
Crimp does nothing so crass as to try to provide explanations for such monstrous events, the pop psychology that endlessly pontificates about abused childhoods or marital woes. Instead, this tale of ordinary, catastrophic madness is like looking the wrong way down a telescope at the quiet moment before the maelstrom, the deathly pause before the police move in with their white tape, and the TV cameras start rolling, and everyone wonders how the nice man with the nice house, wife and kids could do a thing like that.
Watching Face to the Wall, you wonder why it doesn't happen more often.
· Until March 25. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
