A small bombshell has arrived from Montreal: an attack by Olivier Choinière, translated by Caryl Churchill, on what Robert Hughes once termed "the psychotic cult of celebrity".
Both the play and Joe Hill-Gibbins' production leave us in no doubt as to our own complicity: clad in Wal-Mart staff jackets, we sit in the Theatre upstairs watching supermarket staff embodying our common fantasies. We listen as the store manager and two assistants recount their obsession with a pop superstar, Celine, who has chosen to make her private life public. She has even hired a photographer to record every stage of her ill-fated pregnancy. But when a card from a devout, bedridden fan, Isabelle, is smuggled into Celine's bedroom, we get a hideous glimpse of the cruel logic of celebrity-worship. Defined only by her relationship to Celine, Isabelle eventually becomes a living skeleton.
Choinière pushes his argument to extremes, but his point is valid: that by elevating fellow beings into secular icons, we destroy our sense of self. Though he doesn't analyse the source of our modern malaise, he brilliantly describes its manifestations: one of the checkout staff treats the mere presence of Celine as a form of benediction.
Hayley Carmichael recounts this episode with the right sense of rapt wonderment, and Neil Dudgeon, Brid Brennan and Justin Salinger adroitly suggest that underneath every chain-store stargazer lurks something sinister.
· Until April 26. Box office: 020-7565 5000. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
