A road trip with Neil LaBute at the wheel is bound to head down some dark and twisting byways. So it proves in the American author’s cycle of seven vignettes, all set in the two front seats of a car, and all bearing the familiar LaBute tyre tracks of black humour and disturbing dysfunction. Language is slippery, used to manipulate, justify or deceive, and often one character’s stubborn silence is as eloquent as the high-velocity chatter of another. Tim Sullivan’s production is delicate and intelligent, but slow; for all that the writing’s nuances demand close attention, you long for him to step on the gas. The acting is similarly detailed — but the piece’s repetitive structure has limited appeal.
From the conversations emerge stories of abuse, betrayal, violence and obsession. Sharon Maughan (best known for her long-running flirtation with Anthony Head in the Gold Blend ads) is coolly elegant throughout, playing three discreetly floundering women negotiating, respectively, a vengeful, drug-using daughter fresh from rehab, extravagant business-trip indiscretions and a husband’s appalling secret. Zoë Swenson-Graham is a fresh-faced Lolita whose cross-country journey with her driving teacher (Henry Everett) has a sinister forced cheeriness. By contrast, she turns a lovers’ tryst with Tom Slatter as her smug grad student boyfriend into a horribly funny nightmare, transforming from the bouncy check-out girl he mistook for a simple bit of disposable fun into a wild-eyed stalker.
The car, a “bubble of glass and steel”, initially makes an effective thematic device, with its contradictory connotations of freedom and confinement, protection and danger. But while the backdrop, in video projections, changes — cityscape, prairie, suburban street — the overall dramatic effect is as monotonous as a long stretch of freeway. And ultimately, we encounter these people too fleetingly to care much what happens when they reach their destination.
Box office: 020 7478 0160, to Sept 20