St Nicholas The Bush, London

DUBLIN-born Conor McPherson's progress as a young writer in a hurry has taken another step in West London simply with the casting for his new play. Brian Cox' commands the intimate upstairs space of the Bush Theatre as a Dublin journalist and theatre critic who starts his monologue in a fallen state and proceeds to fall further. Under McPherson's direction Cox gives the sort of big man's performance you hope for, but rarely get, from Albert Finney He offers up the brutality of his character here with confident delicacy and refuses to overplay the depth of his failures. His powerful, defeated presence gives you both as he charms the audience into accompanying him on a monologue which takes him from The Flowing Tide on an Abbey first night to a vampires' den somewhere near Crystal Palace.

The first half of this journey is compulsive, as the hard-drinking hack delights in exposing the glib hypocrisy of his so-called work. The real relish with which he curses and dismisses any who obstruct him is undercut by the standpoint of his storytelling. The tale was all in the past and something has changed him since, giving him a strange sweetness as he addresses us.

The supernatural second act is not well-crafted, funny or substantial enough to explain this transformation. McPherson's script leaps into fancy, but his dialogue falls back onto the page, and even Cox cannot lift it into the theatre. A final discussion about the nature of reality seems curiously trite compared to the rollicking action of the critic's earlier, gloriously clumsy stab at redemption.