Infertility may be the starting point for this new play by Stephen Orlov, but creatively speaking, that is hardly the writer's problem. Where many plays suffer from a woeful lack of ideas, this one takes so many on board that by the end the head is spinning.
Orlov starts with a newly married couple, American writer David Stein and sculptor Lena, confronting Stein's infertility. This leads to a prolonged biology lesson in which we learn a lot about the current state of "reproductive technology". But since David's doctor is Palestinian while his father is a deeply conservative Jew, we also get a play about racial and cultural misunderstanding. On top of that, Orlov endows David with a phantom child to illustrate male hang-ups about the need to beget sons. In addition, he launches into a satire on the god-like tendencies of the medical profession. By the end, he skews plot and character to raise ever more moral issues: the clinic is suddenly made wildly incompetent in order to launch new questions about surrogate motherhood and Arab-Jewish relations.
As you will see, Orlov has quite an agenda, and any one of these subjects would have made an interesting play. But this is all a bit much. When Orlov relaxes, he writes rather well. He is good on marital anxiety, on Jewish memory, and on the desire of the Palestinian doctor - who says "I chose the scalpel, not the sword" - to escape the revenge cycle. But plays are at their best when they investigate rather than simply accumulate ideas.
Watching Julia Pascal's production, I was also thrown to learn that the heroine was supposed to be 49, and that the ticking biological clock is another of the play's issues. Since the actress playing Lena looks barely 25, the point gets rather lost. Abdala Keserwani as the Palestinian doctor and Jeffrey Kaplow as the Jewish traditionalist both impress, although there is some noisy acting for so small a space.
You emerge from the theatre having learned a lot about the in vitro method and sub-zonal drilling - more, in fact, than you might ever really wish to know.
· Until December 15. Box office: 020-7837 7816.
