Charlotte Jones, as we know from Humble Boy, is a great entertainer. She creates lively characters and dialogue, but if I have any reservation about her highly enjoyable new play, it is simply that Jones, like her ghost-writer hero, is haunted by images from the past.
Set in Hampstead on Halloween, Jones's play is about a group of people each searching for their identity. The ghost-writer Max is a man of no convictions, plagued by recurring images of his estranged daughter, Anna, on his plasma TV. His wife, Harriet, is an equally lost soul, who finds solace in shopping. Their guests at a disastrous party seem equally adrift. Eddie is a failed Carthusian monk, while his date Jacklyn is a loner dabbling in new age ideas. Only Imogen and her strait-laced husband seem to have any secure sense of self.
Jones works out her ideas with spritely humour: Jacklyn is a particularly vivid character whom Adie Allen endows with a luminous eccentricity. I also felt for Matthew Marsh's Max, who hides his failures under a defensive irony. But, as the play progresses, the echoes become over insistent. The socially catastrophic party suggests Ayckbourn, and the marital squabbles evoke Albee. There's even a hint of Macbeth in the way Max is haunted by his own private ghosts.
Anna Mackmin's production is stylishly done and there are anchored performances from Eleanor David (as Harriet), Lloyd Hutchinson (Eddie) and Katherine Parkinson (Imogen). Jones is a good writer. I just feel that her Halloween play offers a few too many familiar tricks alongside the undeniable treats.
· Until January 6. Box office: 020-7359 4404.
