Ted is a hill farmer. Rather, he is a hill farmer's son. Ted does no discernible farming. Instead, he sits in his saggy armchair all day, and possibly all night, dipping into a bottle of whisky.
Ted is quite as saggy as his armchair, and the room in which he sits is a monument to a life that is not just disintegrating, but seems to have stopped entirely, like a clock that has wound down. In Rachel Blues's evocative design, the wallpaper peels off the walls. You can almost smell the damp. A faded column of red-coated soldiers marching up the walls is a reminder of a happier time, of a boyhood turned to desperate, lonely middle age. You wonder who painted those figures, the gap between then and now.
The gaps are never entirely filled in Peter Harness's monologue, but that is no matter, because he creates a complete world, an achingly claustrophobic world, as Ted tells us of the mother who, he was told, had "gone to a better place" - leading him to wonder why he had been abandoned - and the father who couldn't cope with intimacy and had a penchant for poisoning. Ants, weeds, rats: they all get the arsenic treatment. But it is Ted who ends up doing a stretch in prison.
Not, of course, that it is Ted's fault. It is Mongoose who gives him the ideas, writes the poison-pen letters. Mongoose is Ted's best friend, Ted's only friend, and he seems to exist only in Ted's head. Mongoose is the best friend in the world and he is also a troublemaker. He makes Ted do things, bad things. But in a lonely world, a friend is a friend.
Harness's story is beautifully written: it is tough, delicate and cunningly structured. But it is a long short story, not a play, and however sensitively it is staged - as it is in Thea Sharrock's crisp production, and superbly acted, as it is by Richard Bremmer whose whole body exudes puzzled defeat - there is no getting away from the fact that this is narrative fiction, not fully fledged drama.
· Until May 3. Box office: 020-7620 3494.
