Why did Simon Stephens call his play about the 7/7 terrorist attacks Pornography? Well, the stage is inexplicably filled with television sets and sound boxes. The most disturbed of the eight characters on show, a girl who has persuaded her brother to have sex with her, suggests that they watch a bit of porn, which he won’t.

The nearest to a pornographer we meet is a bomber who talks of “fat little pigs” in “miniskirts and spangly eyeliner” - an observation that says more about his mad prurience than the children he wants to “wipe off the skin of the world”.

Otherwise, Stephens makes little attempt to explore the psyche of this disturbingly cheery terrorist, but he does follow him as, “lighter than I’ve felt in my whole life”, he makes his fateful journey to Aldgate. At this point you half-expect some characters to meet their deaths, but, no, none is directly affected by 7/7. They’re like most Londoners that day: getting on with their lives or, as T. S. Eliot patronisingly put it, “living and partly living”.

Mark you, those lives aren’t without incident. A secretary, angered by a rude boss, faxes trade secrets to a rival. A professor hamfistedly tries to seduce an ex-student. A grotty, confused, racist schoolboy from a violent home falls for a teacher and has fantasies of murdering the man she fancies.

Add those incestuous siblings and a widow who “doesn’t see anyone, doesn’t speak to anyone”, and you have a fairly odd and none too salubrious cross-section of London 2005.

Indeed, you get the feeling that Stephens’s choice of characters is pretty arbitrary. You wouldn’t be surprised if a dodgy plumber or despairing greengrocer were to take the stage. But maybe that’s the point. How did these self-righteous young men dare to take scattershot aim at people who were variously sinning, apologising, loving, hating, drinking, sobering up and generally struggling with what Sheila Reid’s widow-woman calls “that horror story, London in summer”?

Actually, Reid isn’t identified as a named character in the programme, but nor is Matt Rawle, Sacha Dhawan and the other members of Sean Holmes’s excellent cast. Together, they remind you of a few days in which Londoners started by hooting their car horns after the city was awarded the 2012 Olympics and ended up bewildered, in mourning but perhaps not wholly unchanged.

The incestuous brother suddenly feels self-indulgent, besmirched, wrong. And the lonely widow knocks on a strange door, asks if she can taste the chicken she smells being barbecued, and, amazingly, is welcomed inside. 7/7 had its after-effects, and maybe they weren’t all bad.

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