Laura Wade has a talent to disturb. Last year, she won golden reviews for Colder Than Here and Breathing Corpses which dealt, respectively, with terminal illness and living death. Now she has come up with a well-observed, quietly moving play about the gulf between our increasing technological efficiency and emotional insecurity.
Hayley, a jargon-spouting management consultant, lives with Steve, a problem-solving computer wizard. Both, however, suffer from a disabling form of repetitive strain injury that symbolises the repeated monotony of their relationship. Both also actively seek consolation elsewhere. Hayley enjoys verbal, dinner-table seduction with a married, middle-aged client while shying away from total commitment. Steve, meanwhile, relishes a platonic friendship with lonely Lydia: an out-of-work office manager who makes up for her technological idiocy with an instinctive kindness.
Wade's own structural skill sometimes leads to a contrived neatness: Lydia, it turns out, has lost her job through one of Hayley's cost-cutting exercises or what the latter would call "rationalising the head count". But Wade writes with beady accuracy about relationships that nervously stop just short of sex. The dinner-table scene between Hayley and the mature Greg is like a more arousing yet sadder version of the famous restaurant episode from When Harry Met Sally. And Lydia is a genuinely original creation: a 34-year-old woman happy to offer Steve hugs, comfort and splints made out of ice lollies but who shyly backs away from a kiss.
Bijan Sheibani's production brings out the emotional tentativeness of our supposedly sex-mad society. Anna Maxwell Martin as the slowly disintegrating Hayley, Richard Harrington as the manually crippled Steve and Michael Gould as the unhappily married Greg are all good. But it is Katherine Parkinson's Lydia, generous, innocent and solitary, who makes the deepest impression. She touchingly embodies Wade's point that, in the age of super-skills, managerial jargon and the hard drive, untrendy goodness is a precarious survivor.
· Until March 11. Box office: 0870 429 6883.
