PURELY by chance, Mark White and Paris Jefferson auditioned together for Terrence McNally's New York two-hander.

Like Statham and Trueman, Toshack and Keegan, Bacharach and David, theirs was a natural partnership and York Theatre Royal artistic director Damian Cruden knew he had found his Frankie and Johnny.

White, an ebullient North Londoner with the face of a Rolling Stones guitarist, had never been to York, let alone the Theatre Royal, and Cruden had seen him only once on stage, playing a transvestite, homosexual, drug-dealing pimp from Yorkshire in Boy George's musical Taboo - "speaking just like Ivy Tilsley" on George's advice. Save for a shared Eighties' setting, his latest role could not be more different.

As for Paris Jefferson: this itinerant spirit has a French first name, was born in England and raised in Australia (her off-stage accent is Aussie) and her home is Los Angeles, where she enjoyed a season as Athena in the cult fantasy series Xena - Warrior Princess. She was planning to be in England only for a fortnight, when her agent hooked her up with the Frankie And Johnny audition. What luck for York!

White and Jefferson are utterly at home with each other from the moment this most intimate of dramas opens with cynical waitress Frankie and short-order chef Johnny getting jiggy in the rumpled bed of her rented, cramped New York apartment.

It is the mid-1980s (symbolised by Billy Joel's urban tales for the pre-show and interval soundtrack), but theirs is a universal story of a quest for true love. Damaged goods, both carry debris: after an abusive relationship, she is as brittle as osteoporosis and suspicious of flattery; Johnny, once married, is rebuilding his life after doing time for forgery and is as thrusting as a boxer's jab.

Forget the elongated, soft-centred 1991 film version with Pacino and Pfeiffer: McNally sets his play over one long, intense night; the only kitchen is in the apartment, and theirs is a relationship where, if you can't stand the heat, get out of that kitchen. McNally's script has the grit of adult truth, the hurt of a deep wound, the humour of experience, and all that detail is matched by the performances, be it Jefferson licking her fingers when preparing a meat loaf sandwich or White's bullish electricity yet tender heart.

This is Damian Cruden's best work of the year. Unstoppable, unforgettable, unmissable.

This show contains some not exactly unpleasant bedroom nudity and "Pardon My French" language.

Updated: 11:46 Monday, October 07, 2002