Any play that opens mid-conversation with the statement, "And that's what I believe is wrong with America today", has an awful lot of explaining to do. The strange thing about Kelly Stuart's drama, here receiving its UK premiere, is that it presents a remedial vision for an America that already seems to belong to a more innocent age.
Stuart's play was written and set in the summer of 2000. Bill Clinton is still in the White House. The LA riots are the closest the country has come to a contemporary armageddon. America is still, by and large, safe.
Director Tim Stark was in the process of giving this play its initial reading when he heard the news that the World Trade Centre had been struck. That it has finally reached the stage at a point when the world is a completely different place might suggest that it has been comprehensively overtaken. Instead it functions as a bleakly comic exercise in dramatic irony.
Stuart presents an intimate study of a quartet of young Americans utterly absorbed in the domestic trivia of their own lives, but dallying with the prospect of political activism. Susan (Penny Layden), a children's book illustrator, frets about conditions in the refugee camps of East Timor, and rather quaintly resolves with her friend Claire (Rebecca Egan) to don burkas in sympathy with the women of Afghanistan.
Longing for some wider form of engagement, Susan is seduced by the weary machismo of war reporter Wesley (Sean Campion) - a mature alternative to her over-medicated husband, David (Sean Gallagher), who only discusses world affairs as a means of delaying orgasm.
It is Stuart's sympathy for these characters that compensates for the insularity of their outlook. For even if they are content to doze their way through life, we cannot help but know what an almighty wake-up call awaits.
· Until November 27. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
