It begins with the exquisitely awkward morning after a drunken one-stand the night before. Emerging from a sofa-bed in a musty bedsit, still in his pants and socks, cheeky cockney Joe ("they thought I was dyslexic in school - turned out I was just fucking thick") calls out to Petra, who is in fact called Peta. This is the first of many such fumblings where identity is concerned in Chloe Moss's tender, and often brilliant, new play. In five taut, tense scenes, her characters show scant ability to read each other, and even less in understanding themselves.
The framework for the play is a series of fleeting and almost anonymous encounters between lonely, lost souls in the city. Peta, a childlike young woman, has moved to London to forget who she was in Liverpool, and in these conversations tries to reinvent herself, borrowing lines from one visitor to her room to use with the next. Clutching at what she thinks might make her a grown-up, she binge-drinks and invites men back, but then only wants company because she is afraid of the dark.
Moss's writing evokes these nocturnal collisions beautifully, using silence as powerfully as words, and brittle comedy as deftly as tremendous sadness. The emotional stasis of her characters - the blank canvas of Peta, her insomniac neighbour flattened by life, a socially inept teacher in a confusion of tweed and cords, a very bling clubber let down constantly by men - is intensely, impressively realised, and faultlessly played by the small cast. One or two lines don't quite match the rest of the play's high standard ("I said I can be spontaneous," the teacher wails, "I just need a little bit of time to plan"), and the interval slightly dissipates things, but this remains an impressive production of a promising new writer's work.
· Until October 23. Box office: 020-7610 4224
