Earl's Court has often lived up to its reputation as one of London's more louche areas, not least in the inter-war period when Patrick Hamilton, author of Gaslight and Rope, lived in a shabby boarding house there. I don't think the Finborough was among the local boozers he haunted, but that enterprising pub-theatre is only a short walk from Earl's Court Square, alias Fauconberg Square, where he set the novel he wryly called Hangover Square. It is also yards from the street where, back in 1932, a drunk driver smashed his leg, ripped off his nose, paralysed his arm and left him half-dead.

So here's a local work by a local writer: one that was published in 1941 and later adapted for the stage by Fidelis Morgan, but not one that radiates huge affection for pre-war Earl's Court. Here are idlers, spongers, alcoholics and admirers of Mussolini and Hitler. Above all, here's Netta Longdon, the actress who spends her life trying to net prominent men in the city Hamilton once called a “crouching monster”: London itself.

Certainly, Netta has no time for George Bone, the ordinary-seeming man who becomes sexually obsessed with her. He's someone to pay for her dinners and get her introductions to producers, but otherwise “useless”, “a fool”. However, both Christie and Haig struck their acquaintances as ordinary - and, though he's a lot nicer than either, Matthew Flynn's shambling George needs only to put on his battered mac to put you in mind of both. Indeed, Flynn is excellent as a man in the grip of schizophrenia and monomania. He's wan, apologetic and needy at first and, as Gemma Fairlie's dark, tense production proceeds, grey-faced, red-eyed and desperate. Netta intersperses contempt with encouragement, luring him to a dirty weekend in Brighton, only to arrive with a sleazy Fascist sympathiser with whom she has noisy sex. “You didn't think I could stand you alone?” she tells George - and leaves him to pay the bill.

This cold, sneering woman is played by two actresses, Caroline Faber and Clare Calbraith, who swap characters: one embodying Netta herself, the other urging him to murder Netta. It's a curious device, presumably intended to bring onstage the sympathetic Netta of George's dreams, but doesn't spoil one's enjoyment of a play that has its misogynistic moments but is always troubling, always absorbing.

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