Characters need room to breathe

Following the death of their mother, long-suffering Tom gives up his ambitions of travel and education to devote himself to his fragile younger brother, Alex ('There's nothing wrong with him, but he is a bit mental,' explains Tom with an irritating lack of medical precision).

In the meantime, their sister, Sally (Sarah Beck Mather), is off making hay in Oxford. A decade later, life has moved on for Alex and Sally, but not for patience-personified Tom.

Ciaran McConville's drama packs ten years of quite complicated family life into two hours' stage time.

The writing is emotionally ambitious - it aims at nothing less than a definition of love - but falls back too often on pat verbal formulas and obvious plot contrivances to be entirely convincing. The clunking snow metaphor is portentously unilluminating.

The decision to use footage of talking heads offering their thoughts on romance and other love-related themes hardly helps to lighten the burden of cliché in Samantha Potter's production.

Kerry Bradley's ghostly stage design, which covers the back of the playing space with black and white family photographs, is likewise guilty of overemphasising the thematic seriousness of the piece.

This is a pity, because there's a good cast and McConville's writing has a certain charm when it forgets about the weightiness of its subject matter and just allows the characters to breathe a little.

Snowbound
Trafalgar Studios
Whitehall, SW1A 2DY