They like rubbing our noses in it at the Bush. After a Scottish play about heroin addiction comes this new American piece by Adam Rapp that offers a mixture of drugs, degradation and defecation, and gives us a less-than-beguiling glimpse of New York's lower depths.
Yet, for all the play's self-conscious squalor, there is a strange tenderness in Rapp's writing that marks him out as a name to watch.
Rapp's setting is a rented Canal Street shoebox on Christmas Eve where everything, including the lives of its occupants, is falling apart. Baylis, the tenant, is an angry, sterile, incontinent Desert Storm vet living off his disability benefit and wrestling with a slipped disc, a suppurating foot and a ruinous assault charge that has left his victim brain-damaged.
As if that weren't enough he has taken under his wing a pregnant, heroin-addicted 19-year-old stripper, Froggy, suffering from hepatitis, physically on her last legs yet reluctant to make a life-saving journey home to her Detroit parents. For the truth is that the two characters love each other with an odd, hectic passion.
The problem is that Rapp piles on the misfortunes with a sock-it-to-'em glee. By the time you've watched Baylis changing his soiled diapers or Froggy suffering her evening sickness, you've begun to lose sight of the real issues: in particular the fact that Baylis is as much the victim of his tough Chicago background and active Gulf war involvement as Froggy is of her abusive middle-class father and aborted education.
But, even if Rapp's social critique gets lost under the squalor, he shows a strange, humorous compassion for these two no-hopers. This is a play where Froggy's description of Baylis as "a dickless faggot who poops in his pants" is a term of positive endearment; and where he, for all his rage and fury at everything from a nesting blackbird to the intractability of language, loves her enough to buy her a bus ticket home.
Two fine young American actors lend the piece authenticity. Paul Sparks, who has the hawk-like profile of our own Malcolm Storry, brings out Baylis's volatile tenderness, and the copper-haired Elizabeth Reaser gives Froggy the right mix of worldliness and innocence. Mike Bradwell's production and Lisa Lillywhite's design are also unsparing in their portrait of Canal Street poverty.
Even if the play is sometimes hard to watch, I recognise that Rapp has a genuine Gorky-esque talent and loves his characters as all-consumingly as they do each other.
Until July 7. Box office: 020-7610 4224.
