FOR Clare, the child psychiatrist at the heart of Stephen Poliakoff’s play, it’s just one of those days. Her most creative client rejects her. A young man she thinks a particular success assaults her. She herself realises that she must dump the nerdish partner whose lecture on London buses she has managed to miss. Her usually silent secretary attacks her for being inattentive to parents’ wishes.

Oh yes, and the mother who blamed her for not being on call when her little boy went missing, and has become a vindictive stalker as a result, inveigles her into one of those underground car parks that have fascinated and appalled Poliakoff since his Hitting Town in 1975 — but I’d better not reveal all that ensues in that concrete Hades.

Sweet Panic was last seen at Hampstead in 1996, and here it is at last in the West End, with Victoria Hamilton replacing Harriet Walter as Clare and Jane Horrocks, not Saskia Reeves, in the role of Mrs Trevel, the self-professed mother from hell who vows to ruin her.

Again, I felt the tension and admired the droll, quirky observation of characters who themselves are mostly odd, alienated, needy and obsessed. Who but Poliakoff would bring on a father who unpacks a briefcase full of vegetables, just to show Clare that he can make good soup and so isn’t the fool he suspects his disturbed son believes him to be?

Yet again I felt that the play, well-written and absorbing though it always is, didn’t cohere into the dramatic whole it might have become if a more ruthless director than Poliakoff were staging it.

On the one hand, there’s the tale of Mrs Trevel, whose initial malice is eventually and none-too-plausibly to be seen as purposeful and even useful, since it demonstrates to Clare the hollowness of her assurance and the limitations of her skills. On the other, there’s Poliakoff’s trademark evocation of the big, sad city: here a London where condoms and needles litter the parks and the old certainties have given way to universal insecurity.

I suppose the two strands come together in that vast, desolate car-catacomb below Marble Arch — the shrink belatedly acknowledging her impotence in the face of urban change and human confusion — but the situation and some of the conversation are so artificial that it’s hard to go along with either. Subtler visual effects and a more sinister atmosphere might add credibility; but we’ll have to wait for those until the production becomes a TV film next year.

Meanwhile, Horrocks does generate a genuine sense of danger and Hamilton, though never the forbidding, confident-seeming figure the text seems to postulate, falls apart pretty comprehensibly. Two good, meaty roles. Two top actresses. Maybe that’s compensation enough.

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