Simon Stephens is a writer whose work I would travel far to see, so last year I headed off to Sheffield to see One Minute. A second viewing makes me realise that I underestimated this quietly poignant and compassionate play, set in London in the aftermath of an 11-year-old girl's disappearance, which points up the connections between people as well as the gulfs between them.
In my defence, the play sits better, and somehow seems more distilled, in the claustrophobic confines of the Bush Theatre, where Anthony MacIlwaine's spare, graffiti-splashed design with its slabs of sofa and table suggests not just the concrete byways of the city but also a graveyard. The play remains mysteriously elusive, perhaps because the characters find it hard to get a grip on their own true feelings and motives. And there is no getting away from the fact that in its narrow focus and stock characters - the weary investigating detective, his callow young sidekick, the comic madwoman - this sometimes feels very much like an artily written small-screen drama.
Yet there is something compulsive about a piece that captures the dislocated and disconnected strangeness of the city through the fleeting intimacies of a group of people who are linked by the disappearance and death of a child. This is one of those plays where words fail, and it is in the silences that it speaks most eloquently. That is a terrifically hard thing to pull off, and Stephens does it admirably. It is also a play steeped in grief - for a murdered child and for the dreams that we murder every day.
Gordon Anderson's production goes with the flow of a play that bleeds from one scene to the next and seems to seep relentlessly across the stage and into your mind and heart. The acting is good and true, with Teresa Banham outstanding as the bereaved mother puzzling out a way to go forward.
· Until February 28. Box office: 020-7610 4224.
