Gregory Motton's new play is a bit of a turn-up for the book. In place of the antic surrealism that has made him so popular in Paris, he offers us a naturalistic study of the reunion of two old lovers. My guess is that Motton, a prolific Strindberg translator, is heavily under the spell of the Swedish master's preoccupation with the febrile neurosis of passion.
Motton's pair certainly show that pain and anguish don't disappear with the bus pass. Mr Smith is a dying, 73-year old writer living in a remote seaside cottage. There he is visited by Mrs Thomas, a 60-year-old lawyer, accompanied by her third husband whom frustratingly we never see. And over 10 scenes the two oldies pick over the unhealed scars of a relationship that ended tragically 30 years ago.
As Smith says, amid the mutual recrimination, "both of us seem to think we are the keeper of the true flame of love and that the other is trying to blow it out".
Creditably, Motton passes no moral judgment on his characters: what he conveys is the waste of two mis-spent lives. But I would find the play more moving if it weren't so starved of circumstantial detail. What kind of books does Smith write? What happened to the wife and children who were the ostensible cause of the separation from his lover? And why does Mrs T's husband, vaguely involved in the arts, tolerate this trip back into her romantic past? If Motton has used Strindberg as his mentor, I wish he'd borrowed something of the latter's ability to anchor love-hate relationships in daily reality.
But, even if the play made me impatient, the acting at the Theatre Upstairs, under Simon Usher's direction, is wonderful. Neither Jane Asher nor Michael Feast look nearly old enough for the characters.
But Asher beautifully shows the woman's glacial facade slowly thawing out of concern for her dying lover and from memories of lost happiness: her sudden smile on the recollection of ice cream getting into her eye hints at her long-suppressed tenderness. And Feast lends the solipsistic old recluse, who feels we are "all alone with God in this nasty dead universe", a neo-Beckettian bitterness. Acting as good as this makes me forgive the hermetic nature of Motton's writing.
· Until November 26. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
