The weapon that gives Joe Penhall’s latest play its title doesn’t seem so fanciful. It can’t be long before someone produces tiny drones that communicate with each other as they identify and target individual foes. If there’s a plausibility problem, it’s with their British inventor, whose crisis of conscience and elevation to the moral high ground comes pretty late in the day for a man who has laboured too hard and enthusiastically to claim political or military innocence.

But such objections are likely to surface only after you’ve seen Roger Michell’s finely acted production. At the time you’re bounced into belief by Tom Hollander’s lead performance, perhaps because he emphasises what’s erratic and childlike in Ned the boffin: wearing rumpled-student clothes, fighting over takeaways with his judgmental brother, emitting the odd adenoidal wail. Would such a man suddenly decide to withhold his patent when he twigs that his invention will be part-owned by America and maybe sold to the Israelis and Saudis? Well, maybe.

But this reveals another problem in a play that’s always absorbing and sometimes as lively as Penhall’s Blue/Orange. Is it credible that this confused infant would stop gurgling with glee at his invention and start arguing with Pippa Haywood’s Ross, whose job is to exploit it financially? Is it plausible that the result is an articulate, balanced debate about “acceptable” weaponry, scientific responsibility and, topically, Middle East politics?

“We throw everything we can at what is essentially a human problem except humanity,” declares Ned. “We should try to negotiate without the leverage of weapons up our sleeve.” The words surely echo his author’s views yet don’t clunk too much because Penhall has raised the dramatic stakes by introducing a government spook determined to bring Ned into line. And Jason Watkins manages to be cool, incisive, genially threatening and deeply sinister as he goes about the business of breaking down men in Pinteresque style.

I don’t think I’m revealing too much if I report that Hollander ends up suffering from Stockholm syndrome and looking like the unkempt, broken Stanley in Pinter’s Birthday Party. Such is the cost of resisting Britain’s military and economic interests.

It’s a strong performance, and matched by Haywood, who brings a hockey-captain eagerness to her role in the death industry, and Julian Rhind-Tutt as a brother whose show of principle is undermined by an avarice for money and possessions altogether missing in the muddled, flawed, morally ambivalent Ned.

Box office: 020-7452 3000.

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