THEATRE / Someone Who'll Watch Over Me - Vaudeville, London WC2

'I hope this isn't the start of the rush hour,' says Stephen Rea's mordant Edward as he surveys the latest arrival in the Beirut cell he shares with Adam (James McDaniel). Michael (Alec McCowen), a prissy English lecturer completes a joky triumvirate of an American, an Irishman and an Englishman. In fact it is one of the pleasures of this play, transferred to the West End from Hampstead Theatre, that it recognises the particular poignancy of jokes in circumstances where laughter often has to be forced from the body. What price in-jokes where there is no out?

But gags are only one of the strategies the hostages use to fend off despair and breakdown. McGuinness's funny and moving play also shows the paradoxical liberty of the random, child-like fantasies which the men use to fill the time - shooting imaginary movies, mixing elaborate cocktails - all of which give his play a structureless fluidity. With another subject you might criticise it as 'going nowhere'; here it serves well to convey the sense that these men have more than enough time to roam mentally, even if they are chained to a wall. Box office: 071-836 9987