The Great Depression understandably haunts a writer like Arthur Miller. What is more unusual is to find a young dramatist such as Naomi Wallace evoking its economic brutality; but it is the Depression's mix of hopelessness and militancy that lends weight and substance to this touchingly poetic play about the anguish of adolescence.
Wallace's setting is a rusting, small-town backwater in 1936. Her main characters are Dalton Chance and Pace Creagan: the former a gauche 16-year-old, the latter a slightly older daredevil tomboy. And it is the androgynous Pace who initiates Dalton into a world of sexual experiment - and the deadly game of outrunning the daily steam train that crosses the trestle bridge at Pope Lick Creek. But we know from flash-forwards to Dalton in prison, awaiting possible execution, that the game has had a fatal conclusion.
As a study of teenage angst, the play covers familiar ground, and the problems of female sexual ambivalence have been well charted by writers like Carson McCullers. What gives Wallace's play its power is the pervasive effect of the Depression on human behaviour. Playing chicken with the trains is a desperate way of creating excitement in a town where no kids are going to college.
Meanwhile, Dalton's father, unemployed after 19 years in a foundry, has retreated into brooding solitude and Dalton's prison-gaoler has turned his own violent despair against his son. Only Dalton's mother resists the enveloping gloom by taking part in a factory occupation.
The play is an act of imagination rather than, like Miller's The American Clock, a reconstructed historical memory. But as such it is highly persuasive and has the ring of authenticity. Even the occasional moments of forced lyricism, such as a game in which the two kids strew each other with feathers, are well camouflaged in Raz Shaw's atmospheric production. Jaimie Todd's timbered design successfully evokes the world of the trestle bridge and the desolate prison. Steven Webb's pained naivety as Dalton is admirably countered by Hannah Storey's brash confidence as Pace, and the idea of female strength overcoming male weakness is echoed in the performances of Kate Harper and Nicholas Colicos as Dalton's parents.
But the real pleasure lies in Wallace's skill in showing how economic depression contaminates individual lives.
· Until May 31. Box office: 020-7620 3494 .
