It's not always good to share. Live Theatre has two writers-in-residence at present, novelist Julia Darling and poet Sean O'Brien. For this production they have embarked on a resource-pooling exercise in which both gain use of a couple of actors, a director and a kitchen sink.
When an individual author sets himself or herself the challenge of writing multiple plays for the same cast on a single set, the self-imposed restriction can be imaginatively liberating. Live Theatre's venture seems rather more pragmatic.
Both plays receive tidy productions by Jeremy Herrin and excellent performances from Charlie Hardwick and Trevor Fox. But it does feel as if O'Brien and Darling have cooked up a couple of kitchen-sink dramas to order, rather than producing the plays they were burning to write.
O'Brien's From the Underworld is the Orpheus legend retold with Strindberg's sexual politics and Merchant Ivory styling. It is a brooding scullery drama set below stairs in a stately pile, where a vicious, drunken butler applies psychological pressure to a harassed typist.
The production blurb states that "the city is burning, the war lost, the regime doomed" - which leaves you wondering which city it is talking about. What war? Whose regime? The play refuses to enlighten us. The set suggests the second world war, but the mythological references hint at timelessness. O'Brien is a terrific language technician who never lets a word go to waste, but this playlet is so spare that its purpose remains unexplained.
After this darkly subterranean tale, Darling's domestic comedy, Attachments, comes as a breath of fresh air - until a catastrophically inept vacuum cleaner salesman switches his sample model into reverse and fills the room with billowing dust.
Darling crafts a neatly twisted tale about a grieving woman and a garrulous salesman that explores the full comic potential of probing nozzles and sucker attachments. I was so impressed to see the machine make a fresh ketchup stain vanish on stage that for a moment I seriously considered buying one. Asthma sufferers, however, are advised to sit well back.
· Until November 30. Box office: 0191-232 1232.
