It is a mad, but instantly recognisable world that appears in this new piece devised by Will Adamsdale and Chris Branch, who both worked on Filter's brilliant Faster. That play was about the "hurrysickness" of modern life and this one looks at the loneliness and absurdity of contemporary urban living. This is a city where a machine eats your Goldfish, you use an Oyster to travel, traffic calming does the opposite of what it says, you can spend 26 hours on hold and companies not only have names like Consignia, but their employees don't have a clue what the company does.
Wylie (Adamsdale) is one such employee. A cog in a faceless corporation, Wylie even finds getting in and out of the office a bureaucratic nightmare of lost dockets and spiteful lifts - throughout the show Branch not only plays all the other characters but provides entertaining on-stage sound effects.
When he loses his job, he sets out on a quest to discover the owner of the receipt that he finds stuck to the sole of his shoe. This journey and his need to connect with a stranger take him across the anonymous unforgiving city.
After accidentally winning the Perrier Award with Jackson's Way, it is good to see Adamsdale sticking with theatre but, while The Receipt has bags of charm and plenty of potential, it still feels like a show in early development. It is like a pair of long, baggy trousers that don't quite fit, requiring a really good dramaturgical tailor to knock them into shape. Adamsdale spends far too long setting up his world so that the receipt element feels too incidental, and there is never quite enough at stake for Wylie for us to really care. Some of the other characters need to be more deeply embedded in the storytelling. It's halfway there, but will Adamsdale and Branch find the courage to complete the journey?
· Until December 4. Box office: 020-7223 2223.
