In the final part of this depressing and obscure triptych of scenes set near Heathrow airport, a maths teacher called Jonathan, played with gangling conviction by Angus Wright, suddenly says, “When I was three, I got stuck in quicksand”.
A flicker of fellow-feeling rose at last: the sensation of being sucked down with no footholds. It may well be intentional on the part of Simon Stephens and his director, Katie Mitchell. As Thought for the Day might put it, maybe “we are all, in a very real sense, sinking in slime”.
Mr Stephens is an Olivier winner, noted for using mundane settings and psychological acuity to explore, as an admirer wrote, “the blankness and violence that underpin human intimacy”. Mitchell is an avant-garde auteurish director: both are big in Germany. So hell, nobody was expecting fun. But it is the sheer lack of clarity which sinks this play.
The first scene is the best: in a conservatory under the flightpath, a foster mother, Frieda (Linda Bassett, quirky and real) is seeing off the gloomy adolescent Harry to count whales in Vancouver Island. There is an Alan-Bennettish humanity here, and the sound of aeroplane effects promises a meditation on partings.
But for the second scene we move to a hotel room where a couple are contemplating sex. Only Lisa has secrets to confide first: she’s a police officer, in child protection.
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Oh, and a heroin addict, who funds her habit with porn films. She describes the most exciting (seven men, bondage, Epping Forest) in proud detail to her alarmed swain.
“It is online — would you like me to find it for you? Over 24,000 hits”. It is also Lisa — played with nice menace by Jo McInnes — who offers the metaphor of Wastwater, darkest of lakes, where as her dear old Dad used to tell her on holiday, “you would never know how many bodies are hidden”.
Fortified by sado-masochistic sex slapping, on we go to part three, to a grim warehouse where the brutal Sian is tormenting Jonathan as they await a nine-year-old Filipino girl he is buying.
But however psychologically meticulous the direction, once you seat your speaker (Amanda Hale) sideways at the edge of the stage, she becomes barely audible.
Aficionados will find meaning in it: human darkness, alienation, air travel, whatever. I didn’t. It gave me nothing.
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Except — as Sian recited improbable spy reports about a maths teacher’s building-society withdrawals — a realisation of what could happen if you invited Kafka and Sam Beckett to rewrite an iffy episode of Spooks.
Box office 020-7565 5000 to May 7