Sergeant Filth and Constable Pig are in the interview room of the police station with Kate Devoy. Kate's husband is in his swimming pool with his face blown off. Filth and Pig have a case to crack, and they are determined to solve it any way they can. Filth puts it bluntly: "I long for the days when we could beat the hell out of the suspects or at least show them the instruments of torture."
The problem is that Kate - the only witness and the only suspect, at least from the coppers' point of view - is keeping mum. So Filth and Pig start acting out an improvised scenario to try to explain the £70,000 in unused notes found with Kate, and the contract drawn up between Kate's successful entrepreneurial husband, Jamie, and his business associate, Robert, in which Jamie sells his wife for less than a hundred grand.
A visiting production from Cambridge new writing company Menagerie, Craig Baxter's two-hander is a farcical flight of fancy that explores the abusive power of men in the world of work, their personal relationships and their inability to stop playing the role of the big, tough man. As Filth and Pig act out the transactions of Jamie and Robert, they unknowingly reveal the basis of their own relationship.
There is some lightweight fun to be had here, but the play hasn't told you much more by the end than you can deduce in the opening minutes, and it cries out for some really black Ortonesque dialogue to expose the rot in a world where you can put a price on anything - even a wife. Roger Sloman and Martin Austin are terrific as the policemen, but it is a bit rum that in a play that seeks to expose the damaging side of masculinity the only female character is depicted as a voiceless, passive shop dummy.
· Until December 19. Box office: 020-7978 7040.
