THEATRE: A happy accident

Retreat Orange Tree, Richmond

Put yourself in this man's pointedly old-fashioned carpet slippers. After killing his wife and crippling his daughter in a car crash, the character has severed all links with his old life in Barnes and set up house with the daughter in what used to be the family holiday cottage in Wales. Debbie has found Jesus and maintains that she is grateful for her maiming; Harold, still churning out humorous columns for a newspaper, has found a determined but precarious mental equilibrium in devoting himself to her welfare.

Then, just as he's settling down one evening (headphones on; tumbler of malt whisky to hand; the picture of cut-off, guarded tranquillity) in, looking like a tramp, walks a figure from the past. "I've come to disturb your peace," Hannah announces, a mission for which she is extremely well-placed. She too has suffered family tragedy. Her father (a friend of Harold's) and her mother (his all-but mistress) were killed in an air crash, whereupon Hannah went missing for a year in India. At once decidedly shaky and unnervingly resolute, she has come to demand that Harold give her a home.

You could quibble that the emotional stakes in James Saunders' Retreat are artificially raised by the uncommon number of traffic casualties. "We haven't been a very lucky pair of families, have we?" remarks Hannah, which is putting it mildly. You could also note that Saunders is here reworking material already broached in his earlier hit Bodies (1977). But the main thing that needs to be said is that, in Sam Walters' beautifully judged production, these 100 or so minutes of whisky-loosened talk offer as richly satisfying a dramatic experience as you'll find at present anywhere in London.

On only her second professional engagement, Victoria Hamilton as Hannah gives notice of a major talent. Her dark eyes, disquietingly direct in their gaze, follow Harold everywhere with an expression that is a mix of the hungrily adoring and the beadily monitoring. Passing over a fragile ornament with the detached, experimental manner of a cat prodding a butterfly to see it twitch, or wolfing down her supper with the speedy stealth of a scavenger, Hamilton convinces you that here is a girl who has been driven to the edge. She makes you feel, too, that, in her relentless probing of Harold, Hannah is the girl who can remake or break him.

Tim Piggott-Smith is also very fine, by turns defensively waggish and avuncular, aggressively protective of his sad little status quo, and disarmingly expansive about the nihilism in his temperament which caused the crash and which now buttresses him in his belief that, though we can talk of things going to the bad, it makes no sense to speak of right and wrong. From the perspective of his quietly devastating climactic revelation, the understated tremors of sexual possibility that have rippled through the atmosphere take on a poignantly ironic aspect. If the ending hints that what we have seen has all been in Harold's mind, then you can only conclude that he is wasting himself on those humorous columns.

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Paul Taylor