A son and his elderly mother are out for an autumnal walk in the park.
The leaves float from the sky like feathers, drift across the landscape and bank up like snow.
The mother stamps in the piles of leaves like a small child.
Only this is no cosy stroll together down memory lane. Despite everything once shared, the two are strangers to each other.
Like the deserted family home where the young man has just spent the night with a girlfriend, his mother is merely a shell, a ghost of what she once was.
Dementia has robbed this working class woman of voice, memory, identity, of all that makes us ourselves. "My me has gone.
All that is me has gone'" she cries silently.
There is something of Edvard Munch's The Scream in Ayub Khan-Din's poignant two-hander that owes a great deal more to Samuel Beckett than it does to the chirpy Anglo/Asian identity comedy East is East for which he is best known.
In her shapeless dress, her eyes as wide as a baby astonished by its very first glimpse of the world, Pam Ferris's Woman shuffles and shambles across the stage in search of the words that elude her, in search of very herself. "I just want me again for a momentness," she says. In the appalling tiny silence that follows, you can feel hearts crack.
The desperate, silent reaching out of mother to son is undeniably moving, but Khan-Din's 55 minute play is only half what it could be, largely because the role of the son is so dully written and also dully played.
It is the Woman's struggle to make herself heard, her desire to feel the sun on the face of her memory one last time before she is plunged into unending darkness, that makes this compelling viewing.
Khan-Din's achievement is to have given her a voice whose chipped inside-out syntax rings loud and true in a prison of fog and silence.
· Until Friday. Box office: 020-7565 5000
