Fresh check on skid row

There is a pungent whiff of familiarity about Stephen Adly Guirgis's play, in which low-life losers drift around a Manhattan bar. Hell's Kitchen, otherwise known as Times Square, is the location where these life-casualties gather in the 1990s.

Mayor Giuliani, Guirgis reminds us, was then gentrifying the area, though the impact of this social change on the bar-room frequenters is minimally addressed. Lacking either jobs or money, Guirgis's characters have only their wits, and sometimes the renting out of their bodies, to ensure survival. A little crack cocaine puts painful reality briefly out of mind.

Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh launched this American bar-room school of despairing escapism. And contemporary playwrights have presented today's down-and-outers as victims of a callous entrepreneurial American political system and an uncaring society.

The modest intention here is to sketch scenes from Hell's kitchen life, complete with a senile drunk. And Guirgis's Mamet-like ability to catch and express the nuances of angry low-life vernacular, celebrated when his Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train premiered here in 2002, duly becomes apparent.

Yet Robert Delamere's superbly acted production lacks the close-up intimacy required. Jonathan Fensom's bar-room design, that juts into the auditorium, is too vast. The play's kaleidoscopic and episodic structure resembles Owen McCafferty's Scenes from the Big Picture at the National, but lacks that play's dynamic sense of narrative.

The first bar-room scene, in which Daniel Cerqueira's vainly swaggering, irascible ex-con, Lenny, is stripped of his pretentions, is typical. It rambles aimlessly in too many directions. And the final act, with two deaths, lost love and the threatened demise of the bar, strains overmuch for dramatic effect.

There are, however, two fine scenes of darkish comedy, rueful and pathetic, which capture a fresh and depressing sense of life on the skids. Ashley Davies's Chickie, a young crackhead and Celia Meiras's Demaris who carries a pistol, solicit on 8th Avenue and are briefly caught in fantasies of escape and recovery before reality cruelly intervenes.

And Chickie's boyfriend, Skank, played by Tom Hardy in a remarkable stage debut, is all meaningless hand gestures and contorted body language, as he ineffectually tries to drive a hard sexual bargain with an exploitative businessmen. The scene powerfully conveys Guirgis's outrage at the way the poor lose out.

Until 17 May. Box office: 020 7722 9301

In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings