Soothing pain

There is a misty air of melancholic withdrawal about Ben Clifford's teenage guitarist, identified as The Boy, whose long hair screens or hides his downcast face. He sits in a sinister underground rehearsalroom, while The Girl (Linzi Campbell), who may be after his body or even true love, doggedly tries to persuade him to come outside.

Purple, by the strange, beguiling Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, scrutinises a teenage world of sex, squabbling and powerrelations, seen within the context of a would-be boy band. It sounds all too familiar. But Fosse, whose arresting play Girl on the Sofa was admired at last year's Edinburgh Festival, does not tread the conventional lines of realism. And Purple, which exerts a fierce hold upon the attention as its characters' behaviour grows odder, is faithful to Fosse's theatre style.

The 50-minute piece, in Colin Bradie's taut-wire production and David Harrower's fluent translation, played to a spellbound young audience. For although Purple, a daring entry in the Shell Connections programme of new work written for young people, lacks a traditional dramatic action, there is no missing the inexorable rising of tension.

Ben Clifford, an actor with a real gift for conveying the drag and droop of depression, maintains a glum detachment in the face of The Girl's probing questions. When he tries to desert the band and Michael Argyl's aggressive drummer, who is The Girl's nominal boyfriend, resorts to threats, violence and homoerotic menace, The Boy manifests

a mute, frightened passivity, like a cowed dog. He even allows himself to be locked up. The girl's return precipitates a reaction that suggests Fosse's chilling intention is to reveal the dangerous allure of violence to soothe existential pain.

Also on 19 July. Box office: 020 7452 3000.