Rachel is a Daily Mail lifestyle journalist. Her job involves interviewing pop stars and writing about their home decoration. Setting off one morning for Greenwich to talk to Lulu about her aubergine sofa, Rachel gets off the train at London Bridge on a whim and sets off to walk the rest of the way. But her walk through the underbelly of London life - following the winding path of the Thames and involving a sexual encounter with a teenage boy, getting mugged and hijacking an ice-cream van - turns into an odyssey into the self that will change Rachel's life forever.
The boundary-busting possibility of cities, losing yourself in unfamilar geography and being open to unexpected encounters, has been cleverly explored on stage before in David Mamet's Edmond and, more recently, Fin Kennedy's How to Disappear Completely. But Samuel Adamson's monologue, performed by Lucy Briers, is thin stuff. It conjures little sense of the teeming city and generates little interest in its anaemic protagonist, a woman who knows she is living the wrong life. Its ending is structured in its beginning, so there are very few surprises; Adamson offers smart one-liners by way of compensation, but never suggests that there is a great deal at stake or that Rachel 's journey is essential to her transformation. Toby Frow's jerky production doesn't help much.
Lucy Briers is an actor I admire enormously. She has the gift of suggesting empty hearts behind bright exteriors, of skin stretched over despair. But as Rachel, a "seeker of minor adventure", she is quite ordinary, in part because Rachel's story is one of mundane regret for a life not fully embraced. If only she had gone by bus.
· Until December 15. Box office: 0870 060 6632.
