In Peter Gill's 1969 play nothing happens and yet so much happens. It is like a great, luminous iceberg revealing itself so that you can see the tip, but also the great mass beneath. Set in Cardiff during the 1960s it follows the burgeoning relationship between two teenage boys: tearaway Jeffrey who has spent time in borstal and is now living in digs nearby, and local lad Dennis, an only child who is starting to forge an identity for himself away from the influence of his parents, and in particular his beloved mother.
Gill had just directed his great DH Lawrence trilogy at the Royal Court when he wrote this play, and it shows. Barely an hour long, Over Gardens Out is rooted in the texture and rhythms of ordinary, everyday life. It is in the tiny gestures - the scraping of a plate, the discarding of a coat, the pouring of a cup of tea - that the emotional lives of these people are revealed. It is the quietest of plays and yet also the most powerful, capturing in its long shadows of a summer's evening the point where childhood turns to adulthood and knowledge, the point where there is no turning back.
Director Andrew Steggall understands the simplicity and complexity of this drama. The Southwark space can't quite give the sense of height it requires, but Steggall and designer Tom Curtis use it beautifully, offering a washday riot of sheets that partition the playing spaces and which gradually drop away to reveal a bare stage and the emotional truths at the heart of these people's lives.
There are oddities in the production: if there is no real tea or cats why is the underwear real? But there are no oddities in the acting, with Ryan Sampson outstanding as Dennis caught between the small world of his family life and the expanding universe, and Jeremy Joyce excellent as the puppy-like Jeffrey, a tough boy with a bruised heart.
· Until April 16. Box office: 020 7620 3494.
