Chips on their shoulders

Queen Dido's heartbroken suicide on top of a funeral pyre seems several worlds away from a pub kitchen, where fire is more likely to be related to the chip pan than to epic passion.

Yet in his second play at the Bush, 28-year-old Simon Burt has evoked searingly poetic intensities of love among the pickled onions, seamlessly linking Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with two mismatched couples watching emotional happiness evaporate through the grease fumes.

This is the kind of play that the Bush excels at under Mike Bradwell's artistic direction - a resolutely naturalistic depiction of working-class life that makes onlookers feel like fascinated flies on a wall. Indeed, a few flies would not seem remotely amiss in Lisa Lillywhite's down-at-heel kitchen design, which exudes a slap-it-inasandwich approach to cuisine, with boxes of grated cheddar, huge jars of pickles and haphazardly scruffy floor and working surfaces.

Owen Lewis's production has calibrated all four performances to perfection, so that the cumulative effect of each resonates melancholically with echoes of what might have been. Paul Copley's Charley is rigid with suppressed emotion, a dourly down-to-earth old warhorse whose love of listening to early classical music once he has finished cooking for the day offends Martin Hancock's Richard, who is more interested in shagging his girlfriend Caroline in the store cupboard.

Burt's structural skill as a dramatist becomes most evident in his female characters, who broaden the play schematically by representing both a lost future and a lost past.

Lisa Ellis's excellent, sparkily humane Caroline embodies the muted pain of one who realises that education is taking her worlds away from her blinkered boyfriend, while Polly Hemingway's selfconscious Connie provides a key to Charley's past that could inspire a lament worthy of any Dido. Quite superb.

Got To Be Happy