Terry Johnson's last play was an affectionate tribute to Hitchcock. His latest is more reminiscent of a 1940s Gainsborough Studios melodrama. But, although it is undeniably overheated, I infinitely prefer Johnson's wild excess to other dramatists' buttoned-up restraint.
Even the setting is spooky: an oak-panelled, starling-haunted mansion belonging to a disgraced Tory MP about to embark on a third marriage to a glamour model. But Johnson's main focus is on the two daughters. Abigail is a shy, piano-playing agoraphobe. Louise is a febrile neurotic who returns home apparently to liberate her sister, disrupt their father's wedding and seek revenge for their mother's suicide.
So what is Johnson up to? At first I thought his play was an attack on a culture in which political disgrace is turned into personal aggrandisement. But eventually, like David Hare's The Secret Rapture, it becomes a study of the clamorous demands of the disordered. Starting out as a louche eccentric who greets her father's future bride in bare-breasted splendour, Louise increasingly turns into a maniacal destroyer. You assume, initially, her father is responsible for her instability; but Johnson goes on to imply that real suffering is not a social weapon and Louise's trauma is touched with narcissism.
In the end, Johnson throws almost too much into the pot: good and evil, sanity and madness, the opportunism of a celebrity culture. But his production is rich in theatrical invention, including the eruption of a pair of anarchic Spanish acrobats, and beautifully played. Kelly Reilly is stunning as Louise, suggesting the character's mix of erotic wildness, determined self-preoccupation and deep loneliness. Alicia Witt is equally impressive as Abigail, implying an interior life through her silence, and playing Ravel and Chopin with formidable skill. Oliver Cotton even makes a case for the culpable patriarch and Natalie Walter shows that his supposedly dumb bride possesses a fundamental decency. It may be a play full of cinematic echoes, but in its fascination with sex and death it is pure Terry Johnson.
· Until October 14. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
