Sinners review: Contrived play suggests director Brian Cox's talents lie elsewhere

Brian Cox, superlative stage and screen actor and star of HBO’s Succession, has a sideline as a director. Unfortunately, this showcase for his actress wife Nicole Ansari suggests that’s not where his strongest talents lie.

The lead role of Layla in Joshua Sobol’s play — set in an unnamed country that’s clearly Iran — is a mad challenge anyway. A literature professor sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, she is buried up to her chest for most of the 75-minute running time.

Her guard Nur is her former lover. Though doomed, she has the power in their exchanges because she is honest about her sexuality, while he spouts patriarchal or religious clichés.

From this intriguing nucleus, Sobol spins off contrived arguments about love, faith and mortality, which require Adam Sina’s overemphatic Nur to undergo a complete personality change every five minutes. He’s an ardent lover, then a hate-filled misogynist, then a revolutionary. He also has an orgasm bent over a wheelbarrow, but let’s not dwell on that. Cox does little to finesse the discursive tone of the writing, or the moments when it veers off into pretension or over-ripe sexual reminiscence.

The play does analyse serious issues about the oppression and murder of women. And even though largely immobilised like Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, Ansari is a forceful, charismatic presence. A director who wasn’t also going home with her might have reined in her vocal stridency a bit.

But there is also something rather wonderful about a Golden Globe-winner mounting a passion project in a former bus depot in W10. That’s the sort of offbeat spirit that keeps London theatre going.

Until March 14 (0208 960 0110, theplaygroundtheatre.london)