Norman is the nurse on ward 11 of a metal hospital in Jamaica where the patients are gradually being discharged into the community because the site is wanted for a swanky new harbourside development. Every morning he plays a game with his charges: he dangles the keys to the locked door in front of each of them. If they can grab the keys they have their freedom.
The patients never win the game, but in any case it is lonely, caring Norman, who has never got over an unsuccessful attempt to forge a new life in England and has been deserted by his grasping wife, who is the real prisoner.
On the one hand, Pat Crumper's play is an overfamiliar drama that is formulaic in its construction and in the kind of stories that it tells; on the other hand, it tells those stories so vividly that the audience lives them too, particularly in the lives of old, damaged Gonzales who gazes longingly through the barred window at the sea as if in search of his dead wife. Or young Dappo, whose family sent for him from England when he was nine - but he discovered a mother who was a stranger to him and an abusive, violent stepfather.
This is not a sophisticated play but it deserves to be taken seriously in the development of black drama. The performances also demonstrate the extraordinary breadth and depth of black acting talent in this country: Marc Matthews is immensely moving as the shuffling, squint-eyed Gonzales and Sylvano Clarke shows the vulnerability as well as the pent-up rage of Dappo. As the secretive, educated, obsessive-compulsive Shakespeare, Kevin Harvey gives a superbly controlled performance. Jim Findley is memorable as Norman, a man who wants to free others but who chooses to throw away the key to his own life and sits amid the rubble as the bulldozers close in.
· Until October 19. Box office: 020-8237 1111.
