Catherine Johnson's first play for the Bush in five years combines much of the raucous wildness of earlier work like Dead Sheep with a new note of rueful sadness. In essence, this is a mother-daughter play in the tradition of Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey. Anna, a 37-year-old Bristolian single-mum, is coping with the difficulty of bringing up the 14-year-old El. The problem is that Anna is as much an adolescent as her daughter; and when the latter's teenage friends, Erin and Joby, start playing around with a ouija board at a birthday bash it is Anna who mischievously conjures up the dead. This feeds into the kids' morbid fascination with Satanic rituals and ultimately leaves El feeling more isolated than ever.
What is good about Johnson is her total refusal to moralise. In less sophisticated hands, the play could turn into an attack on feckless mums. But Johnson recognises that Anna is as wayward and muddled as her daughter: her pub work comes and goes, her affair with a married man has just been broken-off and she finds it difficult to express maternal affection.
The writing is sharp, funny and unsentimental. The scene where the adolescents play around with Satanism is both comically absurd - "looks more like a picnic than devil worship" - and more than a little unnerving. If the play has a flaw, it is that Johnson never fully explores the effect this ritual has on El's teenage friends. You are never sure whether they are genuinely touched by evil or see it all as a practical joke.
In Mike Bradwell's production there are matchingly strong performances in the principal roles. Suzan Sylvester's Anna radiates a good-hearted, sexy immaturity, while Alice O'Connell's El, quoting Milton to suit her purpose, has the withdrawn, solitary quality of a fatherless teenager. Jem Wall also offers a poignant study of a kindly handyman reluctantly drawn into this emotional battleground. In the end, Johnson offers no consoling solution, but she describes the perennial tension between mothers and daughters with a wounded accuracy.
· Until June 21. Box office: 020-7610 4224.
