We have been here before: the American play about the married guy and the 16-year-old boy he met through the internet. But where Christopher Shinn's Four, presented as part of the 1998 Royal Court's Young Playwrights Season, crucially left all the important things unsaid, Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder's play is noisily explicit and subtle as a sledgehammer.
Wilder's play is about what it's about: the stalking of Eddie, a Staten Island blue-collar worker, by the adolescent Arnold who yearns for more than cyberspace dating. Not only does the parasitic youth crave sex in Eddie's pick-up truck: he blackmails the older man into taking him camping and insinuates himself into the good graces of Eddie's socially conscious wife, Marie. Only her brother, Nick, a tough-talking NYPD cop, knows the truth about Eddie's physical relationship with the boy.
You could argue that Wilder is making a point about the suspect sexuality of the American male: even the bullish Nick has submitted to a blow job by a fellow football player at high school. But Wilder's play never ascends from anecdote to metaphor, leaves us puzzled as to Marie's blissful unawareness of her husband's sexual tendencies, and seems to draw its inspiration, and dialogue, as much from the movies as from life: when Nick lectures Eddie on his familial duties we seem to have shifted from Staten Island to On the Waterfront.
Wilson Milam's suitably visceral production is unstinting on the pick-up truck orgasms and gets decent performances all round: no complaints about Phil Daniels's nervously lustful Eddie, John Sharian's Brandoesque Nick, Nicola Walker's bemused Marie or Matt Smith's adhesive Arnold. But in the end the play tells us little other than that married men cruise the internet at their peril and easily find themselves prey to youthful scavengers; which may be true but hardly comes as surprise news to regular theatregoers.
· Until November 20. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
