Inside Jonathan Harvey's fat new play there is a thin one signalling to be let out. As we know from Beautiful Thing, Harvey writes cracking dialogue; but here, a potentially rich play suffers from redundant dialogue and over-indulgent direction from Kathy Burke.
The setting is a Dalston garden over a summer weekend, where Harvey unites two potent dramatic myths: that of the ubiquitous dead gay man, from Kevin Elyot's My Night With Reg, and that of the romanticised ex-partner, from Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends. Tony is struggling to get over the death of his lover, Frankie, six months earlier, by starting an affair with a young Mancunian, Iggy. But he is impeded at every turn, first by Frankie's mother, Mary - determined to keep her son's memory alive - then by his lodger, Kevin, and a lesbian friend, Monica, who know that Iggy is infinitely more than a harmless pick-up.
As plots go, it is a perfectly good one. And Harvey clearly understands the tenacity of grief. But Harvey is the victim of his own facility. In the first act he brings on Mary's boozy mate, Rose, who is full of amusing fantasies about her encounters with the famous. The only problem is that this Dalston Mistress Quickly is superfluous to the plot. And, though we soon grasp that the sentimentalised Frankie was a faithless hypocrite, it takes an age for everyone else to make the same admission and for Tony to realise that it is time for him to move on.
The good bits of the play are highly enjoyable, though. Foremost among these is Linda Bassett's performance as Mary - a particularly well-written character. Mary dispenses food and radiates garrulous cheer while clinging to false memories of her dead son out of loneliness and guilt. Harvey grants her many of the play's best lines. Given a Mykonos-holiday sarong by Monica, Mary waltzes around in it, crying, "It'd make a lovely picnic rug. Or a baby's blanket." She exudes chatty, cheerful, joint-smoking bonhomie, but Bassett also suggests a woman who will fight like a tigress to protect the image of Frankie.
There is also a fine moment at the end when the colour seems to drain from Bassett's still, stricken features; but it is symptomatic of Harvey's and Burke's talent for excess that they prolong a perfect image and back it with Orfeo's operatic lament for Eurydice.
Radically cut, this would be a very good play; and one might admire even more the performances of Mark Bonnar as Tony, of Michele Austin as his thick-skinned actress chum and of Sean Gallagher as the devoted, drunken lodger.
Harvey certainly can write: what he now needs is to meet a play-doctor who will put him on a strict dramatic diet.
Until April 14. Box office: 020-7722 9301.
