The young director-dramatist Che Walker is clearly drawn to American plays about rootless women in bleak, urban environments. Having last year staged, impressively, Achidi J's Final Hours by Amy Evans, he now revives Marlane Gomard Meyer's play about a naive actor sucked into the LA porn industry. The result is a 90-minute piece that feels more like sociology than drama.
Structurally, the piece resembles a modern-day Harlot's Progress. What it lacks, though, is any Hogarthian moral indignation. Meyer records, with studied neutrality, the eponymous heroine's arrival in Hollywood hoping to break into movies. Having turned down unpaid theatre work, she finds herself becoming a skinflick star. As she says, "I can have sex with anything and make it look like I enjoy it." But however hard she tries to break out of the vicious spiral, by taking acting classes and studying court reporting, she ends up as a porn-movie talent scout in a business suit.
The one point Meyer makes with clarity is that the porn industry is a seedy extension of corporate life. A scumbag producer proclaims, "You can't begrudge the market," and even Etta is eventually classed as a "talent coordinator". But the play amounts to little more than a series of scenes showing how the system works. I longed for a hint of the puritan fury that energised Paul Schrader's movie Hardcore or some debate about the conflict between porn-movie exploitation and free expression.
Walker's production also lacks the hermetic harshness of Max Stafford-Clark's 1990 Royal Court version. But, against an Ana Jebens set suggesting a shark-infested seascape, he coaxes decent performances from a strong cast. Daniela Nardini's Etta convincingly makes the transition from wide-eyed dreamer to sharp-suited predator, Clarke Peters lends a would-be humane producer a white-suited verve and Tom Sangster is particularly impressive as a ceaselessly twitching junkie gofer. I just wish Meyer had offered us more than a graphic report on the ugly face of Hollywood capitalism.
· Until February 26. Box office: 020-7373 3842.
