Joe, Brian and Felicity don't have much time left. The hospitals can do nothing more for them. Life - and death - must run their course. Alas it is the boredom that threatens to prove terminal in Michael Cristofer's earnest drama set within the grounds of a hospice where those whose lives hang by a thread are encouraged to spend time with their family and loved ones and work through their feelings.
Unfortunately lots of big feelings strung together don't make a great play. From the psychiatrist who sits in the audience and interrogates the patients and their carers about their state of mind as they conveniently work through their emotions from denial and anger to acceptance and hope, this is a play from the let it all hang out school of American drama. It certainly doesn't want you to shed one tear if it can encourage you to cry a river.
Its author, who has since turned to screenplays and whose limp Casanova is currently doing the rounds, won a Pulitzer prize for his effort back in 1977, a sad reminder that as a guide to quality the Pulitzer is to playwrighting what the four metres breast-stroke certificate is to Olympic swimming.
Lucy Briers is Brian's ex-wife, a brittle lush who constantly puts her foot in it although her heart is in the right place, Pauline Lynch the well-meaning Agnes who cares for her mother Felicity. Both are good, and prove that it is those condemned to carry on living after the dying are gone who have the hardest time. But neither they nor Caitriona McLaughlin's production can breathe life into a corpse of a play that's dated in both tone and style.
· Until March 4. Box office: 08700 601 761.
