When the aide argues that he should compromise, "try to see things their way a little", and respect that their culture is different from his, he replies: "At a certain level there really is just one standard, whatever the cultural differences." His father, hurrying to his triumph, talks of "a new era of respect" for the Islamic world, and beginning "the work of finding common ground". But, says John, "I don't think we should give up our values to find common ground. Then it's not common ground, it's their ground and we're just standing on it."

The development of the various arguments is much more complex, and dense, than this outline suggests. At an early moment, when I felt the play might be becoming irritatingly cerebral and Shavian, I began to wonder why we needed the reiteration of these ideas; they are to be heard round the clock on all the news media. But in fact they are very rarely heard or read with such clarity or at such length as this, and it does seem that there is an appetite for something more than the usual media offerings - hence the surprising success of public debates recently.

In any case, this play is full of feeling; the emotional tension develops very powerfully together with the political. In this Shinn has succeeded where others usually fail. David Hare's Iraq play, Stuff Happens, for instance, never rose above the level of an A-level history lesson. But Now or Later tugs at the audience's feelings just as insistently as at their ideas, pulling both in different directions. It is Eddie Redmayne who is very largely responsible for the emotional impact of this play. The other actors are all good, but their roles are rather more schematic than the part of John and they lack the dramatic authority and control that Redmayne possesses, despite his youth.