Some plays catch you out. You are so busy enjoying them because they are brisk and witty that you fail to notice until much later that the whole thing doesn't add up. That's the case with Stewart Permutt's monologue about a middle-aged divorcee whose English village-life existence is shattered by the drastic actions of her only son. This is Alan Bennett's Talking Heads territory, writ larger, louder and more self-consciously funny, but also more contrived.
Susan has spent her life comfortably cloistered in a small Hampshire village. The daughter of the local doctor, she is resolutely middle class, snobbish and not ashamed of it. Her life revolves around her dogs, the local am-dram society, the church, bell-ringing and village gossip. When her husband left, she brought up their son, Simon, on her own and never remarried, although there have been opportunities: "I've been taken of the shelf, dusted down and put back again."
But although Susan stays the same, the world is changing around her. Her 56-year-old friend, Elaine, has converted to Buddhism and run off to Bayswater with her guru, and after years of instability and mental illness, Susan's 33-year-old son Simon has now finally left home and is living in a flat in Victoria with Jamil, who Susan thinks is charming.
Susan has had some trying times with her son, what with the doctors, the pills, the substance abuse and the anger management course, which was going very well until Simon took a mallet to Susan's Queen Anne dressing table. So it comes as a relief that he now seems so settled.
It is easy to see why Celia Imrie was attracted to this script. It is full of hilarious, flashy one-liners. It is only when you start thinking about the jokes that you realise that a middle-aged, middle-class woman just wouldn't use that kind of wit - its sensibility is entirely camp. Camp would not be a word in Susan's vocabulary.
Permutt's script has other fault lines too: increasingly short scenes, too obvious a plot and too much cod psychology But Imrie does remarkably well to make you ignore the cracks. The material may be second class, but she is first rate for all 80 minutes.
· Until June 15. Box office: 020-7226 1916.
