Bracken Moor, Tricycle Theatre, London NW6, review One of British theatre's emerging star writers Mike Bartlett told me recently that he had written a play which was perfectly accomplished, ticked all the right boxes, and yet was better off, he decided, remaining unproduced. There was no compelling reason for it to be staged, he confessed - or words to that effect. I thought of Bartlett's noble act of self-abnegation as I watched the latest from Alexi Kaye Campbell. His playwriting debut at the Royal Court in 2008, The Pride - an exquisite tale of two periods, the repressive Fifties and gay-liberated Noughties - declared a natural talent that has more than proved itself since. And at one level, there are few reasons to object to Bracken Moor. It exudes technical proficiency and dramatic ingenuity. And yet it feels like an exercise. As with The Pride, Campbell's instincts lead him back to an age of stiff-upper-lip denial, only this time it's 1937, and there's no "compare and contrast." With the action set in a gloomy oak-panelled country house in Yorkshire, it's as if we're watching a forgotten work by JB Priestley or some discovered draft by TS Eliot had he turned to melodrama not verse-drama. This is a household presided over by an unfeeling colliery-owner called Pritchard who's intent on deploying efficiency-saving new machinery even though it will cost local jobs. More tender but no less cut off from the world, his wife Elizabeth remains grief-stricken at the loss of their boy Edgar, who 10 years earlier fell into an old mine on Bracken Moor and died before rescue came. The arrival of old friends the Averys and their now splendid son Terence, who was the overly sensitive Edgar's closest pal, opens the door to change; seemingly possessed by Edgar's tormented yet life-affirming spirit, Terence first spooks then spellbinds his elders. In the finest scene, he urges emotional closure along with compassion of a supernatural-cum-socialistic hue. Aside from the relative incongruity of this consciously old-fashioned piece appearing at the Tricycle in Kilburn - mounted jointly with Shared Experience - the company, directed by Polly Teale, serve the pastiche-effect writing faithfully, sincerely and powerfully. Only praise is owed to Helen Schlesinger as the mournful Elizabeth, Daniel Flynn as her granite-hard husband and Joseph Timms as the slick-haired, gleaming-eyed young interloper. And yet would it matter if this had all stayed only in the realm of a possible venture, never executed? Not much.