Sitting in fringe theatres on sticky summer nights can be pretty purgatorial. But this American double-bill about New York's seedy sub-culture justifies the discomfort as it teaches us a vital lesson: we no longer expect drama to offer neat resolutions.
Mike Batistick's Ponies (2003) is set in a Manhattan betting shop and throws together a bumptious Croat, an idealistic Nigerian and an evasive Venezuelan. Batistick confirms Tony Kushner's vision of America as a failed melting pot in that he shows the Zagreb-born Drazen vividly and realistically abusing his fellow immigrants. But the play unravels once Drazen starts to use the US's post 9/11 paranoia as a means of evading charges of stealing the Nigerian's cab. You hear what Batistick is saying but you feel plot has taken over from character. This is a pity since Simon Holmes gives a fine performance as the bustling Croatian chancer.
Brett C Leonard's 10-year-old Scotch and Water takes us into an even more archetypal American setting: the bar room. We watch, intrigued, as a group of New Yorkers bicker under the bleary eye of the proprietress, a former dancer. And, far from being fazed when a guy bursts in a with a gun, they recognise him as a fellow loser and welcome him to their club.
All this will be familiar to students of The Iceman Cometh. But Leonard captures well the slow descent from morning brightness, with fierce debates over sporting trivia such as the line-up for the 1927 Yankees, into afternoon torpor. Mike Sarne is very convincing as a maudlin, brown-suited boozer and Laura Brook, as the owner, touchingly suggests the pathos of fading beauty.
Simon de Deney's production is atmospherically desolate. Instead of ending the play with the hitman's absorption into the group, however, there's a gratuitous plot-twist. It may be the influence of the movies or the result of excess workshopping but, as with Ponies, it mars an otherwise effective puncturing of the American Dream.
· Until August 29. Box office: 020-7704 2001.
