It is said that theatre needs nothing more to function than two planks and a passion. In 1970, David Storey got it down to three pieces of garden furniture and an indefinable sense of melancholy.
As a visual spectacle Home barely exists - it's a fantastically spare and ruminative piece; and the fact that those two chairs were originally occupied by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson leaves an enormous void to fill.
Home presents a beguiling conceptual game - a play that appears to be going nowhere until it emerges, through a delicate skein of hints and fragments, where it's been all along. Storey's dialogue progresses in increments of nuance, non-sequitur and silence, functioning less like a script than a score for five sublimely tuned musical voices.
Sean Holmes's production for the Oxford Stage Company is an undemonstrative masterclass in the art of fine acting; dominated for the first hour by the genial interplay of Christopher Godwin's Jack and David Calder's Harry, the first sharp as a pin, the other soft as a cushion. There seems a perfect transparency to their relationship as they take the air, shoot the breeze and periodically dissolve into inexplicable tears. Yet there's a foreboding sense that these harmless old coots could be rather dangerous in a different context.
Their fragile gentility is subject to bombardment by the coarse, cackling onslaught of Sandra Voe's pugnacious Marjorie and Geraldine James's disorderly Kathleen, a warm-hearted cockney whose skirt keeps riding up above her knees. David Hinton underpins the ensemble in the basso profundo role of Alfred, the burly ex-wrestler who isn't quite all there.
Yet however precise the performances, however exquisitely judged the detail, it only serves to magnify the overall mystery of the piece. Holmes's revival reinforces the strange enigma that pervades Storey's work - it proves there really are no plays like Home.
· At Warwick Arts Centre from tomorrow until Saturday. Box office: 024-7652 4524. Then touring.
