Simon Burt is the antithesis of the "in yer face" dramatists who emerged in the mid-1990s. After a promising debut last December with Untouchable, about two girls sharing a flat, he has now come up with a tender study of love, loss and loneliness. Unusually for a young writer, he seems to owe more to Chekhov than to Sarah Kane.
Burt's setting is the cramped kitchen of a pub/ restaurant in rural Yorkshire. What is striking about his four characters is their sense of solitude. Charley, the veteran chef, is so conditioned to loneliness that he is distinctly put out when his onetime wife, Connie, turns up as a kitchen helper. Even the young waitress, Caroline, and her lover, Richard, the pub's deputy boss, seem curiously isolated for all their storeroom shagging. Indeed, part of Burt's point is the way the younger couple's emotional inarticulacy echoes that of the older pair.
Like Peter Gill in The York Realist, Burt shows how human relationships are overshadowed by differences of class and culture. Charley and Connie's brief marriage was clearly doomed from the start by her parents' snobbish condescension. And Charley's passion for classical music is one of the factors that drives a wedge between the waitress and her lover: to Richard it is all "shite", whereas Caroline finds her dormant feelings aroused by listening to Dido's lament from Purcell's tragic opera. What she doesn't understand, as she asks the tight-lipped Charley in a particularly touching encounter, is "how can you listen to that and you be you?"
Occasionally, scenes repeat rather than advance the action, and Owen Lewis's production fractures the delicate mood with a needless interval. But what I found impressive was the young writer's extraordinary understanding of the reticent despair of middle age. The one hope lies in the intergenerational friendship of Charley and Caroline, beautifully suggested by the gnarled, clenched Paul Copley and the inquisitively wide-eyed Lisa Ellis. Polly Hemingway as Charley's ex-wife and Martin Hancock as the waitress's bullying beau also subtly evoke the pangs of despised love in a genuinely compassionate play that augurs well for Burt's future.
· Until May 3. Box office: 020-7610 4224.
