Nocturne

Peter McDonald puts in a hugely intense performance which does much more than justice to Adam Rapp's two-thirds great, one-third so-so monologue.

McDonald oozes into the poetry of the opening passages, recounting how, 15 years ago, he killed his sister. On Lorna Heavey's sparse set, which could equally be prison or limbo, he conjures up the heat of summer in Illinois, of a teenager driving his first car, a big classic American beast, through the 'burbs.

He finds all the horror and devastation of the death, how it effects the family, and rips the veneer of beauty from their emotionally impoverished existence. McDonald is not just recounting a script, but bringing an intense physicality to it.

Yet when the focus shifts to New York and the intervening 15 years, McDonald's presentation of the mundaneness of the narrator's situation is reflected in the narrative so that tedium sets in to the production.

Nor does he recapture the magic of the opening passages as the narrative moves to its denouement and the death of his father. Vocabulary that had previously helped build a mood and a feeling now becomes friable and detracts from the potency of this sometimes brilliant examination of expectation, loss and inertia.