"Welcome to the Freak Show" is a refrain in the Funhouse: a claustrophobically small, dark room in which Eric Bogosian's furious series of monologues plays out. The flipside of the American Dream, the dark underbelly of post-Vietnam masculinity, the outcasts and the repugnant insiders all around us: Bogosian is savage on the state we are in.
Or were in, in the early 1980s, when this was first performed. Then it must have been scorchingly revealing, exposing a desperate crisis in manhood, a dog-eat-dog culture in which the ordinary man can only flail around, or be brutalised into action. Now it only reminds us what we already know from Goodfellas, Louis Theroux interviews, Jerky Boys spoofs, and just about every NYPD Blue plot.
As social commentary, then, this is well-trodden, if still vicious, ground. What saves it is Kenny Miller's design and direction, squeezing the horror off of the page. Dollar bills coat every wall; there is too much of everything (a swarm of small black lights on the ceiling are like flies); the small space at once evokes the sleaziest bar, the scuzziest house, the filthiest gutter.
Stephen Scott is also close to faultless. He plays a dozen or so male characters: everything from TV evangelist Reverend Tim ("you can say it's not my fault when you see a beggar because you've sent me 18 bucks") to an S&M black rubber fiend, slinking about like an unspoken threat, via a fitness instructor, an insurance salesman, a beggar, a guy on death row who berates us woolly liberals, and a CIA agent on how to best do torture.
When the play begins, Scott is covered head to toe in sleek rubber; by the end he is almost naked. Peeling away layers of this constricting second skin mirrors what the writing is trying to do - reveal what we prefer to ignore. A bit like watching Iggy Pop these days (Funhouse is taken from a Stooges album title), we have seen this all before and it would have been better to have done so when it was fresh and radical. Even so, like Iggy Pop, the Funhouse still pulls us in: the Freak Show remains a draw, if only for its extremity.
Until 14 October. Box office: 0141-429 0022.
