Rona Munro's latest play, set in and around a council estate on London's Finchley Road, consists of four parts or playlets. The playlets must be played in a pre-arranged order, but the sequence can begin with any of the four parts. It is an endlessly repeating cycle, much like the loop of a snake eating its own tail.
The logistics and conventions of theatre production, and the demands of audiences who like their theatre to come in digestible chunks, mean that the unique form of the complete play - a different order inevitably equals a different story - is rather lost when it is presented in two 100-minute chunks as it is here.
No matter, because what is lost in form is made up for by Munro's juddery, heightened naturalistic writing and her eye for the mundane shot with the magical. This is a London both familiar and strange all at the same time. It is a place where a white bird flies off with a man's gold tooth, a mini-cab driver finds his fare can divine through smell both the past and future, urine is used to cure conjunctivitis, raw liver can cure tears, and a young boy, watchful and wary and controlled, starts to cut the apron strings of childhood and face up to the future as an adolescent and young adult.
It is also a London full of casual violence, bruised emotions and poverty, where the smell of grass, laughter and sometimes desperation drifts over balconies on warm summer nights and where the lives of total strangers dissect with each other, entwine for a while and separate like rivers or roads snaking their way ever onwards towards unknowable destinations.
Munro writes with absolute truth about the monstrous pain of parenting, the life blood seeping from the walking wounded and the triumph of survival against all the odds. Gemma Bodilnetz's exquisitely acted production captures both in its fluidity and jazzy, discordant music, a sense of dislocated lives and the impossibility of ever really knowing the significance - good or ill - of events in our lives as we actually live through them. Like all of us, Munro's characters blunder onwards, groping in the dark as they turn their faces towards the sunlight. Meaning only comes with hindsight.
Continues till April 1. Box office: 0171-722 9301.
