When I first saw Stephen Poliakoff's Sweet Panic at the Hampstead Theatre in 1996, I said it felt like a movie. Now it reappears on the West End stage before being made into a television film. But, though it is quietly intriguing, there is still something distinctly odd about it, as if Poliakoff were manipulating his characters to prove a point.
The plot hinges on the obsessive stalking of a child psychologist, Clare, by a deranged parent, Mrs Trevel, the original "mother from hell". Clare's crime is to have been incommunicado during a Bank Holiday weekend when Mrs T's son went missing. For that she is pursued from pillar to post by the mad mum and threatened with ruin. But ultimately Clare is forced to question her professional certainties and accept the dubious point that "panic is good".
The word "panic" derives from the Greek god of nature; and, like Peter Shaffer in Equus, Poliakoff implies child-experts need to acknowledge the mysteries of existence. The problem is the conclusion doesn't follow from the dramatic evidence. From what we see, Clare has an intuitive sympathy with children, while Mrs Trevel, far from being a bearer of hidden wisdom, is actually a vengeful harpy. It also defies belief that Clare would play along with her would-be destroyer rather than summon the police.
As so often with Poliakoff, the fascination lies in the eccentric details. Not only is Clare's partner a world authority on the London metrobus, but one of her clients is a fanatical creator of ready-cooked meals.
And, like Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, Poliakoff is haunted by the psycho-geography of London. An underground car park in Marble Arch becomes a subterranean nightmare, a sunlit Regent's Park is invested with an unpredictable strangeness.
Even if Jane Horrocks as Mrs Trevel seems more like a scavenging bird than a potential saviour, Victoria Hamilton is excellent as Clare: what she presents is a woman of cool assurance gradually disintegrating under external pressure. John Gordon-Sinclair as her transport-fixated lover and Philip Bird as the food-manufacturer for whom nutrition is a religion are also plausibly obsessive.
But, with its combination of yuppie nightmare and topographical exactitude, I still feel that Poliakoff's production will make far more sense on screen than ever it does on stage.
· Until February 7. Box office: 020-7369 1791.
