As decades go, Polly Slade tells us, the Eighties had an unfairly bad press.

On the one hand there was Mrs Thatcher; on the other, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union. It was a time of political swings and global roundabouts.

Famously, the Eighties also produced Ben Elton, whose creation Polly Slade is. Clearly, he hasn't yet got them out of his system.

Blast From The Past, his new play, is a darkly comic thriller about Miss Slade and her affair 16 years ago with an American soldier outside the perimeter wire of Greenham Common air base.

She was then an impressionable, teenage virgin; he a thirtysomething officer who should have known better but who let his trousers make his decisions.

Now he has returned, from out of the blue; ostensibly to tell her that he is now a four-star general, that he has been overtaken by a wave of insincere political correctness, and that he always loved her. But he doesn't want her back.

Quite what he does want is the surprising - and surprisingly effective - conclusion to an involving 95 minutes, written with characteristic Elton wit and added, untypical menace.

Imogen Stubbs and Oliver Cotton are immaculate in this two-handed, single-set piece, whose only significant flaw is in Polly's relative lack of development since the Cold War ended.

It's on in Yorkshire until May 16, a run which is only slightly shorter than the Cold War itself.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.