Rocky Horrocks show

No contemporary playwright has portrayed a London of more menacing strangeness, impersonality and middle-class alienation than Stephen Poliakoff.

In this drama of creeping panic, premiered at Hampstead theatre in 1996, he conveys a sense of pervading tension through the narrative of a child therapist, stalked and threatened by the mother of a patient.

Poliakoff quite loses track of his own lines of fuzzy plot and dramatic argument as his characters increasingly spin desperately out of self control.

But the play's quality of metropolitan nightmare and black comedy, culminating in an almost surreal picnic for the two women in an underground car park is quite arresting.

Jane Horrocks, compellingly strange as the well-heeled stalker Mrs Trevel, sports a prim, cut-glass accent which quite disguises the Lancastrian little voice that made her famous.

She first appears in the therapist's consulting room before a spring bank holiday. Miss Horrocks makes Mrs Trevel's grim face look as if it has never chosen to play host to a smile and she bristles with non-specific resentment and froideur.

Her bossy intention is to ensure she will be able to contact Clare, the therapist, by message or mobile that weekend, if her disturbed son has problems on a visit away from home. The source of conflict begins right there.

Clare in the attractive shape of a vamping Victoria Hamilton makes an unlikely psychotherapist. She looks and sounds more like the type of woman who would plunge into partying than the latest book on therapy for maladjusted kids.

She wears a skirt of flamboyant skimpiness, enough make-up to cover two beauticians and a tight skirt that shows off more shapely leg than a serious therapist would.

Since Clare's mobile is turned off during a weekend away with her partner, John Gordon Sinclair's phlegmatic, anorakish author of an impending slim volume on conductorless buses, the therapist misses Mrs Trevel's frantic messages when her son disappears for 48 hours.