Famed for scorchingly dark works such as The Censor and Stitching, Anthony Neilson has here written and directed a black farce. Nothing wrong with that: it is a perfectly viable genre, as both Joe Orton and Martin McDonagh have proved. The problem is that Neilson is visibly torn between creating a manic laughter-machine and delivering a moral message.
Neilson's premise is seasonal and ghoulish: two dumb cops, who quickly fall into a Laurel and Hardy pattern of bully and victim, are deputed on Christmas Eve to tell an elderly couple that their daughter has died in a motorway crash. While dithering outside the door, they are assaulted by a paedophile-hunting mum convinced they are trying to spirit away a child abuser. Once inside the house, their humane inability to tell the unpalatable truth leads to an endless chain of misunderstanding - one that involves a dead dog, a drug-sniffing teenager and an apparently transvestite vicar.
Bad taste is not the issue. Farce, going back to Feydeau, often has a cruel streak. And the funniest moments in Neilson's play are those that make a bonfire of the proprieties. There is, for instance, a prolonged cross-purpose conversation in which the bemused father assumes that the cops have come to tell him about the death of his dog rather than his daughter. Asked to identify the deceased he launches into an increasingly graphic description - "long very prominent teats" - that leaves the two rozzers paralysed with shock. Where the play falls apart is in Neilson's attempt to reconcile traditional farce mechanics with a serious theme. Clearly he is trying to tell us that truth is better than lies and that the cops' misplaced kindness leads only to disaster; which is fine except that the constables are also expected to play the familiar farcical roles of sadist and stooge. Breaking the plot momentum, Neilson also inserts a totally irrelevant passage revealing that the elderly parents are tragically mismatched. What Neilson forgets is that farce has its own mathematical logic that leaves no room for sentiment.
The play's inherent contradictions are also not helped by the author's stop-go direction. One moment you feel his finger is on the fast-forward button and the next on rewind. A few performances shine through the confusion: Darrell D'Silva and Thomas Fisher build up heads of steam as the flailing constables and Patrick Godfrey exudes benign bewilderment as the father. But they seem to belong in a different play to Alison Newman as the caricatured, cigar-chomping paedophile-hunter and Matthew Pidgeon as the suspendered vicar forced into, rather than out of, the closet. The play seems to be pulling in several directions at once and can't make up its mind whether it is meant to be a punch-drunk gagfest or an Ibsenite attack on protective illusions.
· Until January 11. Box office: 020-7565 5000. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
