For anyone not up to speed on how psychology developed over the latter half of the last century, Patrick Marmion's play is an education. His hero is the experimental psychiatrist R. D. Laing, whose use of LSD at his Kingsley Hall asylum was just one of the controversial methods with which the Scottish quack treated his patients.

In Michael Kingsbury's sure-footed and always engaging production, Alan Cox, as a fearless, pugilistic pioneer of the talking cure, inhabits the maverick title role with all the charisma appropriate to playing a human loose cannon.

The tension of this play lies largely in how far Cox's Laing can push his theories before he is shut down by the authorities. If I have a gripe, it's that while the contribution of Laing and his American Jewish colleague Joe Berke (James Russell) is fascinatingly told, the evening is a much more stimulating for the mind than it is for the emotions.