Traffic is building up on the road to dystopia. Like Caryl Churchill's Far Away, Edward Bond's latest play posits a bleak, cheerless future in which mass suicides are common, family ties are outlawed, and the past is a forbidden, foreign country. But, while Bond's cryptic parable has a certain grisly power, it never plausibly explains how we get there from here.
Although set in 2077, the play has strange initial affinities with Pinter's The Room: the reclusive Sara shares her austere apartment with a surly state functionary called Jams, and lives in perpetual terror of mysterious knocks at the door. Trouble enters the room, however, in the shape of a clamorous chap called Grit, who has travelled illegally from the death-strewn north and who claims to be Sara's brother. Since families are banned, memory is taboo, and space is rationed, the jaundiced Jams argues with implacable logic "we'll have to kill him"; what follows is an uneasy conflict between Sara's residual sibling affections and practical necessity.
I am prepared, for argument's sake, to accept Bond's pessimistic premise, but I would like some explanation as to how we arrived at such a grim future: through war, famine, global breakdown? Although Bond foresees the growth of an all-powerful state - we are even told "authority discourages furniture" - he never makes it clear how some future tyranny could exercise complete control over hearts and minds. It makes little sense, for instance, to banish the concept of the nuclear family, since that has traditionally been the state's great instrument of power.
But, even if the play is based on too many draconian données, it has its own chill gallows humour. Bond makes comic capital out of the fact that petty territorial squabbles survive even in a nightmare future as the three characters engage in an extremely Pinterish battle over the occupancy of the two available chairs.
Bijan Sheibani's coolly clinical production is also well acted by Illona Linthwaite as the terrified Sara, Peter Marinker as her cringingly state-worshipping partner, and Paul Cawley as the fraternal catalyst. The play holds one's attention for its brief 70 minutes; but I still prefer Bond when he is analysing our present, all-too-visible discontents rather than prophesying our impending doom.
· Until November 30. Box office: 020-7620 3494.
