Political plays keep on coming. What makes Andy de la Tour's Question Time peculiarly fascinating is the gap between its ideology and its aesthetics. In terms of content, the play is an outright attack on New Labour, yet in its use of shock revelations it is rather like a traditional West End thriller.
De la Tour certainly has a lively story to tell. His heroine, Angela Hargreaves, is a high-flying Blairite and junior Treasury minister about to be given a Cabinet post. But shortly before her elevation she is discovered by a left-wing journalist to have doctored a document about the viability of a local Private Finance Initiative hospital. Worse still, her domestic life starts to unravel when she finds that her shady, Del-Boy-esque second husband and her student daughter are not quite what they seem. Ultimately, Angela has to choose between saving her family or her political career.
Even if it is perfectly clear where De la Tour's sympathies lie, he has the honesty to articulate conflicting viewpoints: Angela stoutly defends New Labour pragmatism while her octogenarian father represents traditional trade-union solidarity and the journo stands for the politics of anti-capitalist, grassroots protest. But while it is good to hear ideas being intelligently debated, the plot gets in the way of the politics. Angela's public and private troubles are so mountainous that you feel she would be lucky to hang on to her seat, let alone get a Cabinet post. And making a domestic go-between of the radical journalist - who makes Ibsen's interventionist Gregers Werle look like a master of diplomacy - defies belief.
Yet, for all its faults, I found the play immensely stimulating in its willingness to take on traditional Newsnight territory. It is refreshing to hear people arguing about the contradiction of boosting the NHS while handing over hospital-building to the private sector.
De la Tour's own production boasts good performances from Mary Jo Randle as the ambitious Angela and David Michaels as her dubious husband, as well as a quite superb one from Bernard Kay as her belt-and-braces unionist father who suddenly makes one nostalgic for the Wilson and Callaghan 1970s.
· Until March 20. Box office: 020-7503 1646.
