When we stare catastrophe in the face we talk of the small things. When nothing remains except the painful silence, we cough words. We talk of everything and nothing. Anything and all things. We make sense out of the nonsense because we must.
In Enda Walsh's beautiful, terrible play, to speak - to chit chat, to witter on - is to live. Because this is a world where tongues have been sliced away and words silenced. A word as small as "yes" is a triumph and a defiance: each word, however inconsequential, rents a hole in the terrible hush that has cloaked the world.
In two houses, a man and a woman - separate yet connected - talk to keep memory alive, to keep the world alive. He talks of his mother's breasts, meringues and soggy chips; she chats to her collection of china animals of the father whose compulsion for order and timetables spread silence like a congealing pool of blood.
They are the last survivors, the only two who have not succumbed to silence. They will speak the very last words that the world ever hears. They sit suspended in their armchairs, like budgerigars that will one day keel over and fall off their perches into the deafening silence in the valley below. There is no hope, and yet they keep hope alive by the very act of speaking itself.
This is a small play about the big things and the writing is harrowingly precise and poetic. Vicky Featherstone's production is exquisitely measured. Like the play itself, Valerie Lilley and Bernard Gallagher as the woman and the man do just enough. Not more or less, but precisely what is needed.
· Until February 27. Box office: 020-7907 7060.
