Jez Butterworth's new play transports us to one of those new estates, filled with trimly identical houses, on London's outer fringe. There is something off-key about Butterworth's supposedly normal world, however. His central figure, Ned, is a demolition expert who reruns videos of his biggest blasts. He is convinced that his teeming possessions, from a stuffed badger to a bust of Aldous Huxley, are being nicked.
Ned's wife, Joy, views his progressive breakdown with a mockingly sardonic eye. She also dreams of escape, and comes on strong to their neighbour, Dale who hates his car-wash business but is terrified of abandoning his comforting suburban prison.
There is nothing startlingly new about Butterworth's ideas. Not only American novelists but our own Alan Ayckbourn have shown that lust and longing lurk around leafy estates. But Butterworth's play has a wild contrapuntal humour, beautifully articulated by Toby Jones's Ned: Jones has an amazing gift for combining pug-faced ordinariness with a seething strangeness.
His performance defines the tragi-comic nature of Butterworth's play. Ian Rickson's beautifully precise production and Jeremy Herbert's transparent design evoke a world in which diurnal routine is always in danger of descending into chaos.
Butterworth shows that he has a compassionate understanding of the quiet desperation that stalks Britain's new estates. In the past, his characters have all been crazily exceptional. Here he exactly captures the more mundane madness beneath the bland routine of affluence.
• Until 9 May. Box office: 020-7359 4404. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
