Cherished Disappointments in Love

Sometimes it is difficult to know how to apportion blame. In the case of this time-wasting fiasco, does it lie with the father-and-son team of Jouko and Juha Turkka who wrote the original Finnish play? Or is it the fault of Bryony Lavery's free-wheeling adaptation for Sphinx Theatre Company? Or should Sue Parrish carry the can for her grimly ponderous production? My hunch is that the guilt should be equally shared.

The intention, as far as one can judge, is to reproduce the chaos of life and prove that theatre still has the capacity to shock. The evening starts with Janet Suzman offering a carefully scripted explanation as to why she has walked out on the production and doing a mock-Frankie Howerd whinge about how awful the director is. She is then drawn back into the fictive world of the play where she is supposedly a mature newspaper editor who has fallen headily in love with a young Finnish philosopher. What follows is a triangular tussle over the Finn's body and soul between the Jocasta-like editor, a misogynist sergeant-major and a bimbo who at one point appears in whipped-cream underwear.

Behind the play lurks the glimmer of an idea: that the death of the middle class, with its shared values and beliefs, has killed off provocative theatre. Possibly true in Finland but hardly, as Suzman points out, in bourgeois Blairite Britain. But, with the the play's premise strangled at birth, we are left with a hackneyed, enervating attempt to be outrageous. We get Pirandellian confusion between art and life, attacks on the incestuous nature of the nuclear family and hints that the militaristic maleness of the sergeant-major conceals a cryptic gayness.

Such ideas are commonplace in contemporary theatre. If you really wanted to shock a modern audience, you'd have to write a play seriously advocating virginity, sobriety and religious observance. Attempts to achieve a non-linear Hellzapoppin'-like anarchy, with Lohengrin swans suddenly passing across the stage, are also undermined by Parrish's leaden and signally unerotic production. The real mystery is what a fine actress like Janet Suzman is doing caught up in this soggy blancmange of a show.

 Until October 6. Box office: 0207-413 3355.

Soho Theatre