It would be nice to like Rhashan Stone's Two Step. Not only is it the work of an admired actor but it also kicks off Push 04, which is a celebratory season of black theatre, opera and ballet. Yet although it boasts lively dialogue, it is one of those relationship plays that sees life almost exclusively in psychological terms.
Dona Croll plays the mature Mona who, after a gap of 32 years, is visited in her Battersea council flat by Derek Griffiths's Lenny. Once the characters were lovers. Now Lenny is a reformed alcoholic with a white wife, a thriving writing career and a guilty conscience. Currently on the eighth step of his 12-stage Alcoholics Anonymous programme, he has come to "make amends" for past sins. And, given that Mona's life is haunted by the presence of a young child and memories of a miscarriage, it is not hard to work out that Lenny's shame is largely sexual.
Ibsen showed it is possible to build potent drama out of past incidents. But, in leading towards the climactic revelation, Stone neglects to tell us anything much about his characters' lives.
We learn that Mona once worked in a Highgate bookshop and that Lenny has made the transition from council employee to literary success. They seem to exist, however, in a cocoon of personal trauma uninfluenced by the social changes of the intervening three decades. The play's hermetic quality is also reinforced by Stone's use of a dubious theatrical trick to expose Mona's complicity in her earlier sexual downfall.
The best moments are those where Lenny's obsessive soul-searching confronts Mona's simmering resentment; these are very well played by Griffiths, who has the self-righteousness of the reformed drunk, and Croll, who has a nice line in puncturing irony. Ricci McLeod as Lenny's self-proclaimed "bi-racial" son and Remi Wilson as Mona's phantom daughter look in to good effect. But it is significant that Bernadette Roberts's design for Josette Bushell-Mingo's production is dominated by window-frames, chairs and beds suspended in mid-air: it is as if an attempt was being made to lend a surreal quality to a doggedly naturalistic, old-fashioned play about the excavation of past guilt.
· Until September 11. Box office: 020-7359 4404.
