I'd go a long way to see Susannah York in a new play: even to Croydon on a bank holiday weekend. But not even York's magnetic presence can turn Sara Mason's play into a satisfying experience. With a title taken from Tennessee Williams and echoes of Pinter and Beckett, it feels more like a series of exercises for actors than a response to life.
The first act consists of an elderly European woman, Elaine, endlessly asking why she has been brought to a house in Primrose Hill. Is she a hostage? Is the place a hospital or an asylum? Although her hosts - the pregnant Hilary and her black husband Pieter - know the answer, they refuse to reveal the truth. The cryptic dialogue and air of mystery inevitably evokes Pinter; but, if in his plays information is witheld, it is usually because the characters don't have the answer. Here, one simple word from Hilary or Pieter would puncture all the persiflage.
The explanation comes at the start of the second half, which largely consists of the fugitive Elaine wandering around Regent's Park in a mink coat uttering stream-of-consciousness soliloquies. By then, however, one's patience, like the subject, has been exhausted.
Although Mason toys with large themes, such as exile, loneliness and even the concentration camps, she offers no illumination of them. It is always fair to ask of any play: what is it about? You could say that Mason's is about a permanent European-Jewish sense of suffering and persecution. But it mainly seems to be a machine for creating pointless suspense.
York, under Ted Craig's direction, is riveting as Elaine. She implies both faded-European gentility and a sexual friskiness that she memorably turns upon her male captor. But there is not enough hard information in the text to enable her to create a wholly plausible character. And, although Sara Mason herself and Charles Abomeli are perfectly good as Elaine's guardians, they are also stymied by a play that seems to be taking place not in the real world but in some hermetic whispering gallery called Theatreland.
· Until May 22. Box office: 020-8680 4060.
