Incest is rife in Southwark. After the excitements of Ford's Tis Pity She's A Whore at this address, we now have a rare sighting of Stephen Poliakoff's comparably intense play about brother-sister intimacy. Not only is it a reminder of Poliakoff's precocious talent (he was 23 when he wrote it). It also intriguingly prefigures his later film, Close My Eyes, on the same theme.
Like Ford, Poliakoff relates sex to social and psychological circumstance. His heroine, Clare, is a 30-year-old dress-designer lately deserted by her lover: her visiting younger brother, Ralph, is a scruffy student traumatised by being in Birmingham at the time of the 1974 pub-bombings. But even if that in itself doesn't fully explain the need for incestuous consolation, Poliakoff precisely captures the siblings' mixture of post-coital guilt and edgy excitement as they go for a night on the town.
Poliakoff's special gift, then as now, is for bottling urban atmosphere. He offers an unforgettably bleak image of a Midlands city by night with its graffiti-strewn walkways, junk caffs filled with the sound of Muzak, dingy discos cryptically situated beneath multi-storey car-parks. Although a less overtly political writer than Hare, Edgar or Griffiths, Poliakoff has a poetic sensitivity to the spectacle of urban decline; and what is depressing is how relatively little has changed in the intervening two decades.
The play also gains, in Gemma Kerr's tense production, from being seen in a confined space. We become eavesdroppers on the couple's sexual nerviness and night-town perambulations.
Daniele Lydon's Clare also has a wonderful bruised tenderness as if she were both enticing and calming her younger brother whom Daniel Percival plays with just the right neurotic agitation. And Hayley Bishop lends the 16-year-old they meet on their travels a look of glazed sadness.
Today Poliakoff is a star TV writer-director. But what is fascinating is how his preoccupation with the effect of brutalised cityscapes on private behaviour was visible right from the start.
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