If there had only been six or seven, rather than a baker's dozen, I might have been tickled by Howard Barker's playlets, in which he takes everyday objects and the imaginative relationship individuals have with them to illustrate how we are enslaved by our hopes. The objects - whether a cup and saucer once drunk out of by an ex-lover, a Holbein painting, or even a plain gold wedding ring - become imbued with significance and the focus for what Barker sees as our inevitable disappointment with lives full of "desire for what might have been, and despair at what is". This is, I fear, the middle-aged man speaking, and the happy people among us will not entirely buy this doleful thesis.
Sour disappointment may linger in the air, but Barker is in surprisingly mischievous mood, and several of these little parables are pawky as well as poetic. Barker is often perceived as a rather chilly writer, but here he laughs at the absurdity of humanity that dares to hope even as it digs its own grave with a spade. In the process, of course, he can't help but laugh at himself too.
Much of the evening has an angular beauty about it, whether it is Thomas Leipzig's design - which looks very much as if it has been thriftily recycled from a previous Barker show - or the actors' performances, which needle nicely. Some of the best of these plays are like fairy tales in which the mundane object takes on the power of a talisman; a few wallow in the kind of frustrating Barker obscurity that comes when a writer directs too much of his own work and doesn't have to justify and test his writing enough. But the show outstays its welcome: as Barker drums on long and loudly you feel beaten into submission, not seduced.
· At Riverside Studios, London W6, from October 28 to November 8. Box office: 020-8237 1111. Then touring.
