How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found, Crucible Studio, Sheffield

It's unlikely that the playwright Fin Kennedy will disappear now. This surreal drama scooped him out of obscurity when it won the 2005 John Whiting award for new writing. The first unproduced play to pick up this major prize, it remained unstaged until Sam West bagged it for the Crucible.

Kennedy's research took him to the National Missing Persons Helpline and the Met's "Mispers" centre. There, the startling statistic that 80 bodies, mostly those of young men, are retrieved from the Thames each year spawned an idea.

Combining the notion of death by drowning with that of assuming a new identity, Kennedy set about creating a situation in which a character carries out both.

The disappearance involves Charlie, a stressed-out young marketing executive whose life spins out of control when he faints in a Tube station. Recovering in a subterranean lost-property office, he has a series of encounters with a Mephistophelean character (an assured Richard Bremmer) whose roles include a cynical Underground official, smooth-talking advertising boss, avaricious client and identity salesman who might or might not be Charlie's dad.

In his attempts to discover who he "really" is, Charlie slips into an even more isolated world; he loses his job and is stripped of the credentials that made him who he was. This unwinds slightly when he becomes involved with a pathologist (Sian Brooke) who claims he's out cold on her slab. From her forensic knowledge, and from one coincidence too many, we're left wondering whether, in his effort to find himself, Charlie has in fact been found.

In Ellie Jones's fast-paced production, How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found comes across as an intriguing, disquieting piece of work. It unfolds in a series of scenes handled with scalpel-like precision.

Charlie's nightmarish journey is keenly observed by William Ash, while three actors play more than two dozen other roles, with varying success. The dialogue is assured, often very funny, occasionally poignant. Kennedy's is a voice of which we'll be hearing a lot more.