Charlie is cracking up. When he looks in the mirror, he's frightened by what he sees. The entire world feels as if it has a thin membrane over it which, if you popped it, would reveal nothing but grey sludge. But maybe madness is the only sane response to a world of hurry, sickness and profit where the phone never stops ringing, the alcohol and coke never stop flowing, and people have conversations but make no connections? "I don't think the problem lies with me," Charlie (William Ash) tells the company doctor, who only wants to keep Charlie functioning so that he can broker the next deal. "I think things might be genuinely shit." If Charlie's right, maybe it is time to stop the world and get off. Become somebody else.
Fin Kennedy's play is the first unproduced script to win the John Whiting Award. No theatre wanted it. Canny Sheffield picked it up, and Ellie Jones's production proves just how wrong those other theatres were, and makes you wonder how much other gold dust falls between the gaps of British theatre. How to Disappear is a play whose disconnected form mirrors a disconnected world, taking us and its antihero on an odyssey into underworlds of many kinds.
It is a play which you have to break the membrane to discover. On the surface, it is about identity theft, the ease with which it is possible to become somebody else, but underneath it is a metaphysical tragedy about the search for happiness and knowing who you are in a world that constantly dazzles us with its distorting mirror.
Ellen Cain's design is cleverly off-kilter, but the cast of five, playing a cast of many who have ingenious, Lorca-like connections to each other, are totally in control. An unsettling, dangerous play that makes you want to run away from yourself.
· Until April 14. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
