Dark vision of the world

Celia Imrie has made a career out of sounding as if she would be the perfect addition to a vicarage tea-party, though the heretical spark in her eye implies she would be more than capable of causing havoc among the meringues.

Her collaborator, Victoria Wood, is not the only person to have spotted that the poised primness is subverted by an effortless eccentricity, and in Stewart Permutt's new one-woman show Imrie deploys all her comedic skills to deal with everything from the Middle East to a spaniel named after the god of lust.

However, Unsuspecting Susan is also a drama with a dark undercurrent, and while Imrie proves both magnetically funny and touchingly tragic as a performer, the arc of the narrative does not entirely convince. Against

Nigel Hook's terracotta Homes & Gardens set, the actress goes from acid-tipped tittle-tattle about neighbours and lesbian amateur dramatics to a devastating account of a suicide bombing in a London restaurant.

Permutt's point is evidently that Susan's apparently eggfragile snobbery is in fact the armour against devastating aspects of her life, including a runaway husband and a violent, mentally ill son. Imrie powerfully exudes the forced bird-like brightness that hints at the simmering volcanic despair below, but Permutt loads her up with so many one-liners in the first half that her character Susan comes too close to caricature, a fact that sits uneasily with the second half 's desperately topical brutality.

Even so, Imrie's delivery of such lines as "I'm the only female campanologist this side of Andover" is wittily irresistible. And there is an intermittent amusement in viewing the modern world via Susan's dated petty parochialism.

If only Permutt had dared to be less sensationalist, this could be a potent new work. As it is, it sits uncomfortably with Imrie's stridently tongue-in-cheek talent.

Unsuspecting Susan