Simon Stephens has already proved himself a distinctive talent with his plays Port and Herons. But while his latest is written with the same bruised compassion, there is a lack at its centre that makes it stubbornly elusive. Like the sentences that the characters often speak, the play itself keeps on trailing off. This is one of those plays that you watch, understanding what is happening but never quite managing to fathom what it is actually supposed to be about.
Set in London in the aftermath of the disappearance of an 11-year-old girl, One Minute brings together the girl's mother, an unreliable witness, a student/ barmaid and two investigating officers, weary DI Gary Burroughs and his younger sidekick, DC Robert Evans. Not all of the characters meet, or know of each other, but they are all connected, so the whole thing is like one of those magazine features that shows you how Jade Goody is six degrees of separation from, say, the Queen.
The sense of the city - its randomness, its parallel worlds and worlds-within-worlds - is well evoked, particularly in Anthony MacIlwaine's design with its graffiti-covered tables and sofas. Even in its most intimate moments, the writing cleverly suggests how much the characters would like to connect but never really can. There is a kind of absence in all of them that mirrors the absence of the missing girl who disappears into thin air in the bustling city.
But in the relationship between the two cops, Stephens never really succeeds in getting away from the cliches of TV police drama, with its flawed heroes. And all three women are implausibly drawn. One is the stereotypical nice and sensible barmaid, who provides a sympathetic ear for the tired and emotional Burroughs; another is completely cuckoo; and the missing child's mother behaves so bizarrely that you start wondering if she has something to hide, and should perhaps be arrested immediately on suspicion of murdering her own child. The acting, particularly by Teresa Banham as the mother, is good enough almost to make you forget these incongruities, but the play is already slipping away even before you have left the theatre.
· Until June 21. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
