David Eldridge has a wise parent's gift as a playwright. He loves his characters even when he doesn't like them. Take Dave, in Summer Begins. Dave is the self-confessed "biggest wanker in Barking". Dave wants to marry Gina, he wants a family, kids and a nice house in a nice area. But he keeps making a prat of himself, and Gina's patience is wearing thin. It would be easy just to laugh at Dave, but Eldridge makes you understand the quiet desperation that drives him, too.
He does it with Gina, as well. Unlike her university-educated sister, Sherry, who has a graduate job at M&S, Gina is no brain. She works on the check-out in the local supermarket and gets confused about the meanings of thalidomide and paedophile. But she knows that there must be more to life than Dave. Yet if she escapes him, she could end up getting trapped by her needy mother, Beth. Life is messy, even for Lee, who seems to have it made: Lee's dad won the lottery and bought his son a flat. But Lee is lonely and directionless.
Written in the summer of 1996 and first produced at the Donmar in the spring of 1997, this is a young man's play, bright and sparky and as tough as Teflon but with swallow swoops of lyricism. With hindsight, it is easy to see that underneath this family drama, with its deceptive banality, blow the winds of change; and it seems even more crushingly desperate, because Eldridge is writing about the outer reaches of Barking where Cool Britannia is never going to touch.
This is not a big play, nor is it an episode of EastEnders. It is both funny and sad, and Amelia Nicholson's production walks that tightrope with grace, eliciting fine performances all round - and corkers from Holly Atkins as Gina and Shaun Dooley as Dave.
· Until April 29. Box office: 020-7620 3494.
