Richard Bean has rapidly carved out his own territory. Like his earlier plays Toast and The Mentalists, his new theatrical triptych deals with a closed male world: in this case that of three generations of Hull trawlermen. And, while there is a certain ambivalence in Bean's message, the isolated camaraderie of his characters reminded me strongly of O'Neill's magnificent early sea plays.
Bean is fascinated by paternal legacies. In the first segment we are in a Hull sidewinder, the Kingston Jet, in 1965 as a legendary deckhand, Cassidy, passes on sage advice to a young apprentice, Darrell, who turns out to be his natural son.
By 1972 Darrell is cooped up with three other "deckies" on the romantically named James Joyce during a violent storm off the Icelandic coast. But by 2002 the ageing Darrell is working on a museum ship stuffed with dummy trawlermen, and confronting the wrath of the son of a colleague who perished in the earlier storm.
Clearly Bean is angered by the decline of Hull's fishing trade and the transformation of seagoing sidewinders into a branch of the heritage industry. He also vividly contrasts the bravery of the trawlermen with the ignorance of the land-locked Humberside know-alls "who get seasick on Picky Park boating lake".
But Bean's hymn to a vanishing craft is somewhat undercut by his ruthlessly unsentimental portrait of the human cost it exacted and of the appalling risks men endured so that others could enjoy a fish supper.
Even if there is a contradiction at the play's heart, what is impressive is its sense of lived experience. Bean writes with knowledge and humour of the trawlermen's trade and creates in Cassidy a wonderful larger-than-life figure.
And in the central section you understand how the men, who spend three weeks at sea to every three days at home, are bound together by a fractious kinship.
In the tiny confines of the Theatre Upstairs, Richard Wilson's astonishing production and Julian McGowan's design create a powerful sense of life in a sea-tossed sidewinder. Alan Williams's towering Cassidy also justifies the character's mythic status. Strong support too from Iain McKee as the self-improving Darrell, trying to read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist in the midst of an Icelandic storm, from Sam Kelly as a cackling elder reminiscing over times past, and from Matthew Dunster as a panic-stricken deckhand.
If one function of theatre is to take you into other worlds, Bean's play succeeds in conveying the hermetic heroism of a dying trade.
· Until May 3. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
