With the rise of the far right dominating the news this week, Nick Grosso's new play seems curiously timely. Much of it is concerned with the casual racism that bubbles beneath the surface of London life. It is set in a kosher cafe in St John's Wood ("Chopped Liver Civility" says a sign in the window), where Russian waitresses get called Gladiola because their names are considered unpronounceable. The Spanish lack moral fibre, they proclaim; all Jews think they are in show business; black people eat only banana fritters. And as one character describes his son's fraught relationship with his Bangladeshi classmate, who is called either Paki or Poppadom but never by his name, we realise that racism has not stopped filtering through the generations.
Grosso mercilessly exposes these prejudices, relishing the black humour that rises from such absurdity. But he is more concerned with establishing a Pinteresque air of mystery and menace than satirising small-minded Englishness. His four characters - a scruffy man, a partially deaf old woman, a vociferous cabbie and a tarty blonde waitress - gossip, taunt and wilfully misunderstand each other. The old woman is poshly dressed yet swears robustly; she can magically hear when she wants, and at one point rises from her wheelchair to shimmy across the cafe floor. The man constantly contradicts himself and is shrouded in mystery: where is he from? Was he bullied at school? What is he doing in Kosher Harry's? The trouble with his character - indeed, with all the characters - is that he feels too contrived. "Quite the con man, aren't you?" the old woman clucks. "I don't know what to believe and what not." It is as though Grosso is prompting comment on his own play; somehow he leaves the wrong things unsaid.
In Kathy Burke's nifty production in the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs, the play is intermittently hilarious, unnerving and trapped in Pinter's shadow. The performances are excellent: Claudie Blakley struts winningly as the waitress, June Watson finds a singularity in the caricatured old woman, and Mark Benton is a wonderfully crude cabbie. Martin Freeman is particularly good as the man, his face moulding itself constantly to mirror the thoughts of his companions. Like Burke, the cast revel in the grotesque cockney banter; they bring a farcical tone to the evening, but never the intensity that the play needs to really resonate.
· Until May 11. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
