Mike Bradwell bows out, after 10 distinguished years at the Bush, with a rueful, wry, oddly poetic play by Georgia Fitch. She deals, head-on, with the dilemmas confronting women in the modern world: specifically, whether they are still defined by motherhood. To this end, she explores the contrasting fortunes of two friends. Louise is a 39-year-old working-class teacher who finds herself up the duff after a one-night-stand with a dour film-maker and is none too pleased at the prospect. Meanwhile her single-parent chum, Annie, who has a 16-year-old daughter, is delighted at her unexpected pregnancy by an unseen guy called Prozac Pete.
By including Annie's East End mum and lesbian daughter, Fitch puts three generations on stage; what she implies is that the young should celebrate the freedom of choice their forbears were denied. But ideas matter less than her gift for dialogue and mood. Louise is a living character filled with insecurity, anger and a bristling honesty which recognises this is her last chance to catch "the night bus to motherhood". Played by Michelle Butterly, she is a wonderful compound of contradictions.
The two men struck me as twerps. But Heather Craney as the instinctively maternal Annie, Linda Broughton as her Cockney mum. and Jade Williams as her defiant daughter are utterly plausible. It is not a play that solves problems but suggests, in a Simone de Beauvoir way, it is up to women to create themselves.
· Until March 17.
Box office: 020-7610 4224.
