America is at war, says a Wall Street trader in Mark Lee's new play, "to defend our way of life". The Private Room scrutinises that way of life, and finds within it the seeds of the Bush administration's casual violence. Its heroine is Barbara, a junior trader in a Manhattan bank who serves a year as an interrogator at Guantánamo Bay. The writer's own political sympathies often swim too close to the surface, as Barbara's Cuban experience exposes the shallowness of her domestic life. But, however schematically, Lee establishes persuasive parallels between US foreign policy and the macho amorality of Wall Street capitalism.
We're talking here about a culture that defines people by their "number" - the amount they intend to earn before quitting. Virtue is, according to Barbara's flash colleague Lawrence, "what you pretend to have until somebody makes you the right offer". Small wonder she's shocked to meet the manacled Pakistani detainee, Salman, who would kill for what he believes in. The most dramatic, if least likely, sequences in the play show the relationship between inmate and interrogator growing intimate. Common humanity cancels out the clash of civilizations. Then Salman is left to his fate, and Barbara goes home.
Her volte-face conversion from materialism may barely be justified by what we've seen of her Guantánamo experiences - which are quite mild. It's equally hard to see how her chosen means of redemption back in New York relate to the war on terror. But, if the play ends a little weakly, it's well served throughout by some terrific performances. Janet Kidder is tough and subtle as the woman showing no frailty in two testosterone-addled worlds. Michael Hayden nails the hollow swagger of Lawrence, the dissolute city boy who hankers to "do something real". Like Lee's America, he's cut adrift from any values other than the economic. And he's way over his credit limit.
· Until June 26. Box office: 020-7794 0022.
