Artfully withheld information can be a way of heightening suspense. It can also be frustrating, as in the case of Phyllis Nagy's play. Only a third of the way through this hour-long piece did I grasp that Nagy was dealing with the endless ambiguities surrounding sexual pursuit; by the end I felt I needed to see the action all over again.
In a sense Nagy's elliptically intriguing play is like a domesticated version of Frayn's Copenhagen: it suggests there is no definitive truth about any human encounter. It begins with a famous, Camille Paglia-style academic quizzing a businessman for her new book about a rape charge of which he was acquitted. Next she interviews, less sympathetically, the plaintiff who lost both the case and her job. Finally we cut to the crucial beachside encounter between the two main parties and are left to deduce whether the ensuing sex was forced or consensual.
Nagy avoids easy, all-men-are-rapists sloganising. Trip, the businessman, can be seen either as a sadly isolated high-flier or as a cunning tactician. Lucy, the presumed victim, is a strange mixture of abrasiveness and quiet desperation. Nagy reserves her scorn for the academic, who writes about "the supremacy of the male libido" and judges other women from the vantage point of her own privileged independence.
This is an immensely subtle play about the shifting nature of truth, wittily set by Rachel Blues on a bank of sand. Thea Sharrock's coolly inquisitive production contains a mesmerising performance from Ruth Gemmell, whose Lucy has a piercing gaze that both attracts and unnerves, and very good ones from Marcus D'Amico as the ambiguously tentative Trip and Bernice Stegers as the ostentatiously charismatic academic.
· Until October 5. Box office: 020-7620 3494.
