Home, of course, is the most dangerous place of all. Particularly if you are a woman or child. It's in the home that cold resentments come to the boil, tempers flare, and the bread knife is so handy. When you are walking along the street on a winter's night, you often find yourself peering through the brightly lit windows of other people's homes, catching tiny glimpses of their lives, frozen forever in time. The families always look so happy - but what if you are misreading what you see? What if it isn't laughter but anger falling from their lips; what if the man is strangling the woman, not embracing her?
In Second you get the chance to look right into the heart of a house - its kitchen - and into the heart of a marriage. You are paying to be a voyeur. An open steel structure conjures up all the domestic detritus of one couple's lives: the baking bread, endless cups of tea, the way the Guardian crossword can be both an enduring shared ritual and a vicious weapon in an ongoing war where the combatants are bound by love as much as hate. This is Strindberg's Dance of Death for the Jerry Springer age; 60 minutes of open-heart surgery. Not everyone will want to look, but it made me want to peer closer. It's a pity that the audience must remain seated and can't prowl around the edge of this sinister little doll's house.
The performance is multi-textured, using film to provide close-ups, and an extraordinary corrosive layered soundtrack to magnify the unspoken emotional pain of the piece. Second is played in real time, and is often plain boring - which in this case is nearly a compliment. The audience must be alert to the tiniest nuances: the way she flinches, thinking that he is going to hit her when he is simply reaching for a cup; how making a tomato sandwich becomes a point-scoring exercise; how easily a dance turns into violence.
Second's achievement is to reveal what's below the surface of the relationship rather than its apparent exterior reality. And it's sufficiently unsettling that, when you return home, you will probably think about putting the bread knife away. Just to be on the safe side.
· Until December 9. Box office: 020-7729 1841.
