Nightmare on Leafy Lane

At first, you think you know where you are with The Small Things. Enda Walsh's two-hander opens with two geriatric figures in threadbare armchairs: a man (Bernard Gallagher) in highwaisted slacks; a woman (Valerie Lilley) in wrinkled leg-warmers.

Their dialogue is disconnected, half-nonsensical; their vowels are somewhere north of Burnley; the action is punctuated by an alarm bell, just like the one in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days.

And through the chit-chat about parquet flooring and china knick-knacks and church fêtes, something familiar emerges: a story of incest, assault, murder and unreported mental illness - typical English village life, as depicted on the contemporary English stage. Beckett meets Bennett. Here we go again.

However, from this well-worked territory, Walsh has produced an authentic sense of horror: a convincing portrait of a society in the grip of mass hysteria. Listening to the details - ritual mutilation, manhunts, a mysterious pilgrimage - put me in mind of books I read as a child that made me want to sleep with the light on.

Walsh can't take all the credit for the shivery atmosphere. Indeed, reading the script on the way home, passages struck me as overwritten and ridiculous. But director Vicky Featherstone has encouraged her actors to speak these lines like a shared secret language. Neil Warmington's set - a thin spar of parquet to which the couple's chairs are attached by metal skewers - also amplifies the unsettling mood.

So if you want to hear a despatch from the end of the world, visit the Chocolate Factory.

Until 27 February. Box office: 020 7907 7060

The Small Things