Shelley Silas's play is the second in a Bush season devoted to new talent. Intriguingly, it has many of the virtues and vices of its predecessor, Adrenalin... Heart. It is quietly moving and exquisitely acted. But it is also exclusively domestic, and leaves me pining for the days when young writers aimed to be secretaries to society.
Silas's prime preoccupation is with the pressure to procreate. Her heroine, Linda, is a 42-year-old teacher who lives with her horticulturist partner, Pete, and who has suffered five miscarriages. But while Linda wants to give up trying for a child, Pete still has parental yearnings. Their dilemma is underlined when Grace, Linda's 16-year-old niece, abruptly announces she is pregnant. When Grace offers to give her aunt the unwanted baby, she widens the rift between the childless couple.
The strength of the play lies in its compassion and emotional tact. Silas writes with real understanding of the way infertility tests even the most loving relationship. When Linda asks her partner: "What do you want more, me or a baby?" she exposes his deep, unresolved longing for fatherhood. Even more impressively, Silas implies there is a strong sensual bond between Pete and the sullenly sexy Grace, but never lets it get beyond an unspoken desire.
The play is filled with acute psychological observation: nothing is more touching than the way Pete and Linda have given imagined names to their unborn children. But it would be an even better play if Silas allowed the outside world to impinge on this domestic dilemma. Clearly, there is something ironic about the fact that Linda works with children and that Pete is dedicated to making things grow. But their professions are never allowed to influence or determine the action. Silas also never addresses the big questions: why there is still such pressure to have children, and whether our belief in the virtue of procreation is biologically or socially determined.
Within its chosen limits, the play is honest and true. And John Tiffany's production yields the kind of microscopically exact acting we have come to expect at the Bush. Patricia Kerrigan lends Linda precisely the right quiet stoicism. Adam Kotz as her partner exemplifies love under stress, and there is excellent support from Abby Ford as Grace and Jennifer Black as her bewildered and excluded mother. You come out of the theatre stirred by a recognisable dilemma and persuaded of Silas's talent. Is it ungrateful to hope that next time around she will open the doors on to a wider world?
· Until November 30. Box office: 020-7610 4224.
