Grim night in The Dark

If Charlotte Jones's last play, Humble Boy, had not enjoyed such a critical and commercial triumph, I doubt whether Michael Grandage would have rushed to present this freshly minted cocktail of twaddle and piffle laced with artificial sweeteners.

Miss Jones's The Dark is a spiritual resurrection drama, stuffed with clichés, stereotypes and laugh-lines. Eighty minutes in length, it would be better scrapped than snipped.

The idea is to show what befalls the inhabitants of three terraced houses in London when a power cut plunges the residents into evening darkness and brings them loosely together. Lez Brotherston's ingenious set allows for several domestic spaces, from bathroom to bedroom, to be used by all three households .

The distinctly Ayckbournian action keeps cross-cutting between houses and rooms. The same phrases are repeated in different locations while people display their bleeding hearts. Everyone, from Sian Phillips's delightfully cantankerous old Elsie to Brid Brennan's fraught lorry driver's wife, Janet, is either fearful, depressed, repressed, disturbed, unhappy or just plain ill.

The play quickly takes a turn to the preposterous. If only Miss Jones had realised how ludicrous The Dark becomes as she plunges all her characters into deep wells of loneliness, she might have recast it as a grotesque black comedy. But although there is patronising comedy at the expense of the lower-class characters, Anna Mackmin's production keeps a straight face while waves of melodrama break.

In the blackout, Janet's weird teenage son Josh (Andrew Turner), who chats up oldish men on the net, dons a mask and breaks into two neighbouring houses. Having terrorised Anastasia Hille's suitably stricken Louisa and menaced her recently born baby, Josh offers his body to Stuart McQuarrie's tormented John, Elsie's son, who secretly hankers for adolescent youths and bears scars from a recent vigilante assault.

Louisa's husband, a youngish architect in search of candles, no sooner meets middle-aged Janet than he is all lit up in a sex session with her. Fortunately her husband, Roger Lloyd Pack's glum lorry driver, has gone rummaging for a torch in the wood-shed.

After the neighbours have communed in the dark together, bared a bit of confessional soul and Miss Brennan's Janet has run amok, the electricity goes on again. All round optimism and sweetness unjustifiably breaks out like a rash. A grim night out.

Until 24 April. Information: 020 7369 1732.

The Dark
Cert: cert15