New Year's Eve. Two brothers and their best mate lurch drunkenly along a cliff path in Wales and end up not in the village pub, as expected, but in heaven. We have been here often: the Right Size, for instance, offered a comic view of the confusions of the afterlife in Bewilderness. Frantic Assembly, meanwhile, has covered young men, emotional constipation and death in Hymns, and loss and grieving in Tiny Dynamite. Heavenly, Frantic's latest show, gives you its two predecessors for the price of one. This is not necessarily quite the bargain it seems.
Heaven, in Dick Bird's ingenious, utilitarian design (it doesn't just look nice, it pays its way) is a place of wall-to-wall mattresses and Ikea sofas. There are fluffy white bathrobes, baskets of grapes with welcome cards and free pizza and cigarettes.
Through the trio's ribald, laddish banter we gradually piece together their relationship, a jigsaw of shared memories and tangled lives. There are jokes about rewriting history and about all the things that at 30 they haven't done and will now never do - taking up flossing, hiring a pod in the London Eye, learning to paint. But beneath the jokiness lurk the unspoken ties that bind them forever.
As ever in Frantic's shows, the language of gesture speaks as loudly as words in the actors' tiny explosions of physicality. Eventually, in the show's final and most involving sequence, machismo gives way to something quieter and deeper; the young men face up to their situation and recognise that the dead must relinquish the living and the living learn to let go of the dead.
Frantic has come a long way in a short time: every show has topped the last. This trajectory probably had to come to a temporary halt sometime. Heavenly is perfectly enjoyable; it is physically dynamic and will undoubtedly win fans among those unfamiliar with the company's previous work. But it doesn't take the company or the audience anywhere new, either in performance style or emotional reach. It is a consolidation, not a leap into the dark, and feels like a play from a company taking a bit of a breather.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 020-7478 0100
