Adam Rapp's last play in Britain, Blackbird at the Bush, was about two lost, heroin-addicted souls in New York's lower depths. In Gompers, he has mercifully widened his horizons to take in the decline of small-town, post-industrial America without losing his instinctive tenderness and off-the-wall wit.
Rapp offers us an Under Milk Wood-like tour of Gompers, a town where the steel mill has closed and everyone is pinning their hopes on the arrival of a new gambling boat. The focus, however, is one particular courtyard and its deadbeat denizens. The block's superintendent, Dent, is into all kind of illegal scams and has impregnated one of the tenants. An HIV-positive resident begs his kindly black ward to kill him off. A middle-aged woman battles with alcohol addiction.
This could easily be one of those American tenement symphonies luxuriating in individual despair. But Rapp opens it out to remind us that the whole town is suffering from economic blight and pinning its hopes on false miracles: not only have the sacked mill-workers been denied health insurance but people seem enthralled by a statue of a blue Jesus bobbing around on the local water.
It is refreshing to find a new American play with 10 characters, and Roisin McBrinn's production does an excellent job in keeping them all in focus. Jeremy Legat, a recent drama-school graduate, is quite outstanding as a homeless, whey-faced teenager who struts around brandishing a stolen cutlass. Noah Lee Margetts as the block's exploitative super, Lisa Diveney as his pregnant girlfriend and Nick Oshikanlu as the Aids victim's nurse all inhabit their roles with absolute fidelity. I suspect Rapp is a keen student of Tennessee Williams; but what he has learned from his mentor is that private despair is intimately related to public decay.
· Until September 18. Box office: 020-7503 1646.
