Bernard Kops's play, a little sick and a lot silly, is about Norman and Sandra Lewis, who live cocooned in the past promises of their old family home in Streatham, she in a kind of emotional prison, he in a kind of practical asylum. Norman is a significantly disturbed and adamantly housebound book binder given to grand app reciations of his microwaved frozen supermarket dinners, Sandra his complaisant shopper and support, indulger in his fantasies and almost ready to fly from the cocoon to a brighter life. Enter Phillip de Groot from (maybe) West Hampstead, and the uneasy balance between threat and complaisance which has kept the pair in their places loses its equilibrium. Not even their usual recourse to a mutual adoration of Frank Sinatra recordings, used when they wish to avoid reality, may hold them through this disturbance.

Jayne Snow has provided an entirely suitable dark red setting in which to contain the comedic grand guignol drama of the piece, but her direction seems, to this reviewer, to require a much more archly theatrical interpretation than she has bestowed upon it. She has chosen an almost naturalistic interpretation for her admirable actors which ultimately defeats the necessary suspension of disbelief which the author seems to require of his audience. The result is an evening of entertaining interest which does not, in the end, deliver dramatic satisfaction.

Guy Carleton, as the pathetically dependent yet dangerously menacing Norman, comes closest to the script's intentions, while Elizabeth P. Moynihan plays Sandra very effectively as a kind of putupon housewife who has to bear the burden of supporting an eccentric child and a tiresome day job outside the home. Brent Hearne simpers too much to persuade that he might be either Sandra's destroyer or liberator, yet his insincerity is palpable through out. It all needed a more grandly theatrical interpretation.

Plays for three weeks, at least. Booking: 01-6763071