Since she was hit on the head by a brick, Northern Irish Tracy can't stop yakking. "I'm Tracy. I'm Irish," she tells everyone at the rehabilitation centre where she lives, as if desperately trying to define herself. The trouble is that she knows she has lost herself; she can no longer relate herself to the person that she sees in the mirror, just as she can't always relate the word "chair" to the thing that you sit on.
The notion that the words we latch onto can define ourselves and our national identity is the subject of Ron Hutchinson's wonderful three-hander. The question is: what does it mean to be Tracy and what does it mean to be Irish? It's a question that has a variation with the arrival of English Julia, injured in a car accident, who carries herself so stiffly and upright it is as if she might suddenly shatter, and who can no longer feel anything at all. For her, every word must be dredged painfully from a brain that has become stuck like a gear stick forever in neutral. Julia is a heightened portrait of English repression and coldness carried to the very extreme.
Hutchinson's play is often funny, sometimes moving and always intelligent. It has added complications in the arrival of the folk-singing, Irish joke-telling Jimmy, who appears at first to be a friend, maybe even a former lover of Tracy, but is quickly revealed to be a facet of her imagination that charms her towards potential disaster. If the evening doesn't quite have the impact that it could and should, it is because only Tracy is fully developed and compulsively watchable, and because Hutchinson tries to hit us over the head with the political metaphors rather than letting us work things out for ourselves.
· Until January 29. Box office: 0870 429 6883.
