Denise and RJ have been holed up in a seedy motel for over a week, watching trash TV and waiting for the social worker to call with news of their baby daughter. Now that they have moved out of town, he has got a steady job and she has stopped turning tricks to fund a drug habit, so they hope to get back the child who has been taken away and placed with a foster family. Only smug social worker Helen - in a neat powder-blue trouser suit, and with fixed ideas of what constitutes a family and civilised behaviour - isn't going to make it easy for them. What Helen doesn't reckon on is the depths of Denise's desperation.
Problem Child is a problem play, uncertain of tone as it veers between melodrama and black comedy. It is clumsily put together and sometimes downright silly. Its author, George F Walker, is apparently considered a major playwright in his native Canada, which makes you think that Canadian playwrighting must be in quite as sorry a state as poor Denise.
There are some redeeming features, not least the way the well-meaning RJ can see how the parade of human misery on the confessional daytime TV shows he obsessively watches robs all involved of any dignity, yet he fails to notice the extremes that Denise will go to to get her baby. Walker also depicts a world in which addictions - whether to TV, alcohol or God - are the norm.
But the piece is not sufficiently funny, sharp or well written to make it seem any better than the run-of-the-mill kind of drama that used to be on television before the schedules were all taken over by reality TV. What emotional power the play does have comes largely from Samantha Coughlan, who, as Denise, makes you feel the caged despair of a woman ill-equipped for life and parenthood but who none the less doesn't deserve to be robbed of her child and all hope.
· Until November 8. Box office: 020-7794 0022.
