The relationship between two sons and their father is a theme that kept Arthur Miller going for years. Now Canadian dramatist Adam Pettle gives it another walk round the block in this derivative but quietly affecting new play that brings Jenny Topper's 15-year reign as Hampstead's artistic director to a close.
Unlike Miller in Death of a Salesman, Pettle puts his fictive family's Jewishness in the foreground and keeps the father off stage. Instead, his focus is on the two sons of old Sam Moskowitz. The elder, Alan, is a rootless, womanising lawyer; the younger, Jed, a Toronto sports writer married to the gentile Amy.
Gradually it emerges that the brothers' lives have been blighted by their father's desertion of the family home, and, when Jed walks out on the faithless Amy, he fights for access to their son for fear of repeating the destructive ancestral pattern.
Watching Pettle's three-hander, it is not difficult to spot its faults. Too much vital information is conveyed through tape-recorded scenes between Alan and Jed as children. The telling of Greek fables and the Cain and Abel story to Jed's unseen child feels like a spurious attempt to give a domestic drama a mythic dimension. And Amy, a shrink driven by desperation to pick up with an old lover, seems a curiously marginal figure in a story of sibling rivalry and a competitive battle for a father's love.
I slowly warmed to the play for two reasons. One is that the scenes between Alan and Jed pack a good emotional punch and show how they have developed without ever fully maturing. Lacking a weekday father they have become as congenitally insecure as Biff and Happy in Miller's archetypal play, and it is a measure of their arrested adolescence that they live for watching or playing baseball. We may have been here before, but at least Pettle shows how childhood's scars rarely heal even in early middle age.
I also got pleasure from the acting in Rupert Goold's well-designed production. Corey Johnson brings out the perennial boyishness of the boozing, skirt-chasing, hopelessly lost Alan. Dan Fredenburgh makes the younger Jed highly sympathetic, not least when seen in his bedsit chewing a pencil and stuck for an intro to a story. And Raquel Cassidy invests the sketchily written Amy with a grave sadness and implied erotic tenderness. It may not be the greatest play Hampstead has ever done, but at least it brings Topper's tenure to an honourable climax.
· Until August 9. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
