Christopher Shinn’s provocative new play does not shrink from contending with big issues. It connects the challenge posed by Muslim fundamentalists and a potential threat to freedom of expression with the conceivable dilemma of a Democratic Presidential candidate in America, who makes overtures to the Religious Right. In fact, Now or Later’s dramatic potential could do with some shrinking itself.

The 75 minutes’ playing time is insufficient to debate or resolve the problems raised. The implicit question Shinn poses about the dilemma facing John, the President’s gay 20-year-old son, under pressure from his father, is evaded rather than settled.

Consider Shinn’s amusing and well- observed scenario in Dominic Cooke’s vivid but sometimes under-projected production. It is Election Night sometime in a better class of future, with the Democrats heading for victory. There is, though, a cloudy aspect to the view from the President’s temporary HQ — some southern state hotel. Damaging pictures from a Halloween party have started coming out on the net. They show John, dressed up as Muhammad, with platonic college friend Matt disguised as Pastor Bob, a politically influential Evangelical who thinks gays are headed for hell in the after-life, if not before.

John, his face and voice in Eddie Redmayne’s riveting performance suffused with the lineaments of neurosis and sadness, sits in his hotel room. He and Matt, a fellow student, both showing scant interest in the results, are disturbed by a Presidential aide, John’s glacial mother, Tracey a black party worker and by Matthew Marsh’s hypocritical President. They want him to publish an apology, regretting his choice of costume. There would, however, be more sense of drama if the pictures had been published during not after the campaign. If only Shinn had concentrated on the thrashing out of an apology that satisfied intransigent John and the President. If only the play had not shot off on tangents.

John is depicted as a clichéd, dated kind of gay young man. Formerly suicidal and subject to therapy, now bereft of his promiscuous boyfriend, he argues too eloquently for a freedom of expression that critiques Muslim fundamentalism, its repression of women and outlawing of homosexuality. The President’s success in coaxing an apology from John unconvincingly concludes this flawed but gripping play.

Closes 18 October. Information: 020 7565 5000.