Last trance saloon

Unfortunately, the Soho Theatre Writers Centre has failed to shield its talent. This rough and ready juvenilia marks Raine as gifted, but no sort of prodigy, and, on this evidence, a playwright not yet ready for such exposure.

The play is either mostly or wholly set in a dream. At the beginning, in a scene full of the kind of meaningless, therefore, meaningful chat that is new writing's plague, a mysterious psychiatrist figure talks teenaged Henry into a trance.

Once there, Henry listens in as his family voice their concerns for him, growing increasingly frustrated as their reports clash with his experience.
The lucid middle section comes when the family are found on a boat, sipping
Pimms. Henry's father, Raymond, rants at them and gets drunk, while over the ship's radio come reports of a chilling disaster.

Sam Cox is entertaining as Raymond, an ex-army man who demands the constant respect of his nearest and dearest. His sadistic digressions on his sons' love lives, porn habits and shooting skills are delivered with broad satirical gusto.

Imogen Stubbs is subtler and funnier still as sweet but blinkered mother India. Yet dream logic makes the satire less biting and the characters less sympathetic. We know these people aren't real.

Nor do their varying strands of conversation lead anywhere purposeful, save to point to a vague angst in the bland Henry. That angst, along with the writer's suspicion of authority and interest in death, brings a drab, teenage feel to the play - to be expected, I suppose, but hardly encouraged.

Come the end, after just 50 minutes, the minor tragedy revealed to have inspired these nightmares proves nowhere near enough to justify all the foreboding that has gone before.

We have been toyed with, and inexpertly. Raine will almost certainly write a good play soon. He can do dialogue, there' s a flash of the lyrical in some of the longer speeches and two plays to his name already bespeaks dedication. Given this potential, it's hard to see how Sohothought this short, confused piece would be a suitable London debut.

Until 3 June. Information: 0870 429 6883

Shrieks Of Laughter