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David Eldridge's play begins with an IRA bomb exploding at Canary Wharf in 1996, but in his flat nearby teacher Nick (Chris O'Dowd) is about to drop his own bombshell on his besotted colleague, Helen (Lisa Dillon).

He intends to shortly leave the Leytonstone comprehensive where they both teach, and Helen, with whom he dallies without making any serious commitment, to take up a post in a minor Essex public school. She seizes the moral high ground, but quickly relinquishes it to her own emotional neediness. The rest of Eldridge's cleverly structured play resembles Schnitzler's fin de siècle sexual daisy chain, La Ronde, but also suggests a series of reverberations from that original explosion.

Nick and Helen never appear again, but they haunt the subsequent two scenes. In the first, Michelle (Catherine Tate), a teacher at the Essex school, has been dumped by Nick and is taking her revenge by sleeping with Graham (Dominic Rowan), "the least sought-after member of the staffroom". But with sexual failure and humiliation, things turn nasty and before long "maths teacher" is bandied as an insult, and fantasy turns to violence as the bedroom becomes a battlefield. It is the effects of another war, more than 80 years previously, that inform the final scene, again between two teachers, Anne (Francesca Annis), and Robert (Nigel Lindsay) who is 20 years her junior and who teaches at the same Essex school of the prior two encounters. Anne's aunt had an unconsummated love affair with a soldier who died in the first world war, which infected the rest of her life, and Anne and Robert's suppressed and unresolved desires threaten to turn their relationship sceptic too.

Those who complain of a lack of serious plays in the West End should look no further. Of course, although it is new writing, it's not actually new, having premiered at the Royal Court Upstairs in 2000. But the emotions here are never second hand, and the final segment - exquisitely performed by Annis and Lindsay - is as compassionate, luminous and delicately written an examination of the difficulty of acknowledging and embracing love as you are ever likely to see.

In an era when all our personal relationships are conducted in the shadow of wars being fought in our name, Eldridge's play takes on new resonance; and if Anna Mackmim's production doesn't yet quite negotiate the balance between pain and comedy, this quietly thoughtful evening reminds that the wars conducted behind closed doors also maim and mutilate.

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