A man, once a futures trader, sits on the bed in the small hours while his wife sleeps. He tells of their relationship, a marriage from which love has fled, blighted by domestic violence.
The wife visits her father in hospital. He is confused and aggressive. He appears to mistake his daughter for his dead wife; he appears to believe that he was caught up in 9/11.
One of the strongest lingering images of 9/11 was of people walking the streets of Manhattan covered in the dust from the twin towers. They looked like ghosts. The dust could be washed away from the body, but somehow it clung to the air like a virus, and spread around the world seeping into our very beings with every breath we took. We are all infected.
Violence is the subject of the latest play by Rebecca Prichard, whose work was regularly seen at the Royal Court in the 1990s. Violence has often been her subject, but those who remember her slangy, energetic Yard Gal may be surprised. After several years of silence Prichard has emerged with a remarkable new voice that urgently probes how we live now. There is something of the Cassandra in Futures, a flawed, fascinating play as broken and hobbling as we are. It knows we have to find new forms in the theatre to express how we feel, and it gropes towards them.
In Paul Higgins' beautifully acted production the effect is to create a quality of silence that is rare in the theatre. It is as if the words have taken flight, leaving us to fill in the gaps. So dense and concentrated is the experience that I suspect it requires more than one viewing to gel; I was uncertain of several things, including the time frame. But I am certain that Prichard is right to suggest that the seeds of violence lie in each of us and that there are dangers of seeing 9/11 as a sin when it is a symptom.
· Until February 25
Box office: 020-7978 7040
