Dramatists need to take themselves, as well as us, by surprise. While Alan Ayckbourn's 66th play is a premeditated attack on what Robert Hughes called "the psychotic cult of celebrity", it achieves lift-off with a scene almost tangential to its theme: one that offers the best exposé of legal trickery since Portia invaded the Venetian courtroom.
Ayckbourn's hero, Charlie, is one of those people who has achieved media fame without any visible talent. A failed athlete and hopeless quiz contestant, he has risen on the strength of his charismatic ineptitude. But, after seven golden years, his marriage is in trouble, he is prey to a destructive TV interviewer and, worst of all, he is caught in a compromising situation with the female clown who is supplying the entertainment at his kids' birthday party.
This is not Ayckbourn's first assault on the sickness of the celebrity culture: Man of the Moment (1988) was an even more bilious attack on media glorification of villains. But, where that was driven by genuine anger, here there is something a touch diagrammatic about Ayckbourn's satire on the fame game; you know that what goes up will inevitably come down. And, despite hints of Posh and Becks in the portrait of Charlie's marriage, there is something so innocuous about the hero that you feel a butterfly is being broken on a wheel.
Ayckbourn's play goes into another dimension with a dazzling second-act scene in which Charlie's whizz-kid lawyer interviews the clown who is making accusations of indecent assault. What makes the scene so brilliant is its delicate moral balance. We know that the charges against Charlie have an Oleanna-like exaggeration. At the same time the lawyer, played with Carmanesque forensic skill by Stuart Fox, seizes on the woman's working disguise as a Mr Chortles to strip her of all dignity.
This scene shows Ayckbourn at the top of his game, in that character drives situation. But even if the rest of the play too neatly demonstrates the slippery transience of fame, Ayckbourn's production makes ingenious use of Roger Glossop's garden-folly setting, and there are strong performances from Stephen Beckett as the blankly charming hero and from Sarah Moyle as the sinister clown with squeaking, Chekhovian shoes.
· Until September 11. Box office: 01723 370541.
