Escape into fantasy

The increased prevalence of hostage-taking and our awareness of the torture-processes inflicted upon hostages help reinforce the power and relevance of Frank McGuinness's 1993 psychological drama.

Someone Who'll Watch over Me, inspired but not directly based on the experiences of Brian Keenan and John McCarthy in Beirut, strikes me now as a terrific piece of imaginative empathy.

It offers exhilarating notions of how hostages survive in extremis. Dominic Dromgoole's beautifully nuanced revival holds a delicate balance between comic fantasising, escapist recollection and emotional volatility. It proves far more affecting than the 1993 premiere.

Anthony Lamble's ideal design, a grimy, breeze-blocked room without even a visible peep-hole, imparts the right airless mood of claustrophobia.

Aidan Gillen's cool, caustic Irish journalist sits chained to the wall near Adam, an American photographer whom Jonny Lee Miller misguidedly invests with the becalmed remoteness and handsome detachment he brought to his bland performance in Festen.

You realise these men are caught in a symbiotic quasi-erotic bind. They are disturbed by the arrival of Michael, a widowed English literature lecturer, for whom Threlfall hilariously adopts an affected elocuting voice and grand, slightly old-maidish manners. The new arrival stands at emotional, antagonistic distance from the younger men.

McGuinness, at his best when depicting male camaraderie, amusingly reveals how fantasising and play-acting, those useful refuges for the trapped and desperate, frees the men from brooding. Their gameplaying ironically becomes a prime mode of communication, a way of avoiding the prison dark blues.

Whether choosing desert island discs and shooting movies in homage to Hitchcock, fixing stiff alcoholic drinks or, with sharp poignancy, writing letters home, these escapist devices cast light on their personalities and serve as therapy for them and high comedy for us.

Threlfall takes first-class acting honours as the humane, ungainly lecturer. His performance captivates with its flashes of donnish eccentricity, middle-England nostalgia and recollections of Old English poetry.

It reaches a comic zenith as he impersonates Virginia Wade winning Wimbledon and imagines himself, childlike, savouring freedom. Gillen's lovely acting, with its undertow of gravity, angst and tension complements Threlfall's.