The gods of fortuitous timing have certainly smiled favourably on the Bush's latest offering.
Steve Thompson's satisfyingly complex, multi-layered moral dilemma of a play takes as its potent subject the arrival of a contentious yet highly newsworthy photograph in the offices of a tabloid paper.
Thompson's sphere of operations is not the war in Iraq but the fraught battleground of the modern build-'em-up-and-shoot-'em-down celebrity culture.
Andrea Dear, a high-profile children's television presenter, has long been a "target" of this particular red-top. A snap of her sunbathing topless with a man who may not be her husband seems to present the perfect opportunity for the pack of rottweiler reporters.
Questions, however, cannot help but arise. Who was the anonymous sender? What were the motives? And is something that interests the public the same thing as it being in the public interest?
Before he can start to lead us, step by meticulous step, through an ingenious series of revelations, Thompson first has to set the appropriate newspaper scene and it is here that Damages is at its weakest.
Thompson, like many who have dramatised this milieu before, fails to avoid cliché and thus makes his three journalists stock characters and the newsroom set-up wishful rather than actual.
Nonetheless Liz Cook's clever design of interlinking offices surveyed by a clock insistently ticking in real time soon re-focuses our attention on the dilemma, and deadline, at hand in Roxana Silbert's taut production.
Amanda Drew is feistily spirited as the young lawyer Abigail, sparring with spineless ex-boyfriend Bas (Paul Albertson), who has recently been promoted over Phil McKee's ruthless hack Lister. Everything centres on Abigail, who has to undertake a very public reassessment of her personal priorities and career objectives.
Anyone who has ever had a friend, a job or read a newspaper will find Damages enthralling.
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Damages
