Last time Eugene O'Neill's boozy two-hander stumbled on to a UK stage in any significant way was in 1980, when Bill Bryden directed a vehicle for Stacy Keach at London's National Theatre. Knee-deep in bruised machismo, the appeal of a character such as Erie Smith to a man's-man type of actor is obvious and Al Pacino and Jason Robards have played it since.

By casting here the brilliant Benny Young, an actor of real star quality who remains inexplicably underused, director Andy Arnold is offsetting the piece's more bullish tendencies by exposing its lead character's more vulnerable side.

As Erie, stumbling into the lobby of his shabby hotel somewhere between three and four in the morning following a five-day bender, Young lays bare a man who defines himself by his losses. The death of hotel clerk Hughie may have robbed Erie of his only audience but, as he becomes both confessor and tempter, attempting to get the new boy, played with magnificent indifference by Neil Docherty, on-side, the event becomes one more anecdote as he peddles his own legend.

Clocking in at 50 minutes, Hughie is a sad and brutal snapshot of beautiful losers, its one-sided offloading recalling Strindberg's The Stronger while anticipating the low-life verbal riffing of David Mamet. Young is a haunted, troubled but unrelentingly bluff figure in a bravura performance full of crumpled, sentiment-free desperation.

A word, too, for Thirst, which precedes the main event. An equally downbeat three-minute monologue taken from a 1914 curtain-raiser, Docherty performs in film-noir trenchcoat rather than on the boat of the original play's setting.

Reinvented as a prologue to Hughie, Thirst is the moodiest of scene-setters for the after-hours world that follows.